Since my dog Harry died a few months ago, I haven’t been in the back yard much. He was the one who ran that space, not me, and the quiet back there without him feels wrong. So when I went out there last Tuesday, I noticed the weeds had taken full advantage of my absence. They weren’t subtle about it either.
The quiet felt too loud, so I put in my earbuds, turned on an audiobook and went to work. The voice in my ears filled just enough of the space to make the yard feel less hollow, and the weeds gave me something simple to do with my hands. After pulling just a few, I was already encouraged by my progress, so my original idea to take it 20 or 30 minutes at a time turned into an hour.
A cleared patch here, a straightened edge there and suddenly it started to look a little less neglected. I wasn’t trying to fix the whole yard at once, but I just kept working, one stubborn root at a time, until the audiobook reached a chapter break and I’d already filled my trash can twice.
Somewhere in that hour, the yard stopped feeling like a place I’d been avoiding and more like a place I could step into again. Not because it was perfect, because it wasn’t even close, but because I’d finally done something about it.
It’s a rare kind of relief just moving from one weed to the next without having to solve anything. No editing, no rewriting, no wondering if this verb or that adjective works better.
At first I thought the voice of the narrator on the audiobook was irritating and almost quit, but soon it actually seemed perfect for the story. Eventually it matched the work. The same pace, the same lack of urgency. Just one sentence after another, one weed after the other, both moving forward without asking much of me.
It felt good to let my mind idle like that, to let the yard, and the voice in my ears, set the terms instead of the clock on the wall reminding me that my deadline is fast approaching.
There aren’t enough moments like that in a day when you can just do the next small thing without thinking about what comes after. Writing never works that way, and life itself rarely does.
But for that hour, the yard let me step out of all that. I didn’t need to be clever or efficient or ahead of schedule. I just needed to keep pulling.
By the time I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees, I realized I felt steadier than when I’d started, despite the protestations coming from my lower back.
The yard still needs plenty of work, but that’s progress, and for now, progress is enough.
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