Beth Troy's Blog, page 6

Day 44: One Week

Of course I don’t know this, but the refrain of one more week was uttered by multiple people in our house this weekend.

One more week of:

Playing professor, principal, and teacherGradingTrying to convince Ezra worksheets are coolEnd-of-school emails School exploding over the kitchenMorning cold snaps (wishful thinking)Jesse missing assignmentsRain (wishful thinking)Convincing myself we can do thisWaking up early to get things going only to sit stumped by the scope of it allWeeds (wishful thinking)Putting off the things I want to do (anything not-a worksheet) because of the things I have to do (worksheets)Math factsA/R quizzes Tommy shouting, “No more school home!”Ezra shouting, “I want a new mom!”Me shouting, “Good luck finding one!”

And so on and so forth.

Day 43: Gardening Constituency

Each TroyBoy thinks he has a vote, and they cast them readily, and usually, opposingly. Their votes on the land were no different.

We closed on a sunny, warmish February day, and celebrated by taking the boys to walk around the property. Jesse took to it immediately. He saw potential forts everywhere, as well as what has the appearance of a hobbit hole in the ravine in the cedar grove. When we move there, he plans to create his own place on the other side of the property where he will hole up until he runs out of supplies (orange juice, jerky, and tortilla chips).

Tommy alternated between screams and “I want to go home” for most of the visit. The land is pretty overgrown and sets off a multitude of his sensory alarms. We’ve since cleared about a half acre of undergrowth where he’s slightly more okay to hang for short periods of time, but it takes some pizza and popsicle bribery.

Ezra declared on the ride over that if we built a house on the property, he would burn it down. He does not like change. But then he found a stick and a mole lying on its back.

“I think it’s sleeping,” he said, poking it with the stick.

“I think it’s dead,” I responded.

“Can I take it home?”

“You cannot.”

“But it’s so squishy!”

“It’s about to get squishier.”

“That’s good because I want its bones.”

I smiled. “For what?”

“To sell. I think I can get about $250 for them.”

If anyone is in the market for some animal bones, I’ve got a guy.

Day 42: Gardening Blessings

Blessings come with teeth. I remember my midwife telling me this in one of our many conversations about the nature of family. In her work, she’d encountered families that couldn’t grow and families that couldn’t stop growing. Regardless, prayers for “the blessing of children” abounded.

But what does that mean – to be blessed? At times in my life, I’ve fallen into the trap of equating blessing to a release of sorts – a question answered, a cessation of pressure, a free gift. There was no weight – no teeth – to these blessings and no expectation for how I might use them beyond my own good pleasure.

Matt and I first visited the land the day after Thanksgiving. Even on the cold, cloudy day where the spectrum of colors varied between white and brown, I saw how beautiful the land could be. I saw how this land was an answer to my desire for quiet and unseen places. I saw how Matt and I could raise our boys here in a different way.

I felt the weight of it, too. It was a lot of acres. Acres cost money and require time, and for most of my adult life, I’ve run empty on both.

I wanted the land, but could I have it?

There was a time I wouldn’t have seen the question between wanting and having. There was a time I would have asked the question while forcing the yes. At other times, I would have sought the answer from family and friends.

This time, I went quiet. I sometimes talked about it with Matt, but mostly, I talked about it with God. In the mornings, I’d pose the question of wanting and having. I would feel the blessing, both the lightness of the vision and the weight of the responsibility. I journaled, which at the time felt like a maze without center, but ultimately led me to John 15.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will even be more fruitful.

This is a popular Bible passage, and I’ve read it many times, but it was the first time I saw the correlation between pruning and blessing.

I saw that pruning was the blessing for me. I saw that pruning would be the steady blessing for my life. I saw that any resulting fruit was meant to go beyond me and my life to bless others.

I saw myself, and I saw the land – both of us, a potential. I’d step into it as I was, but I wouldn’t be able to stay that way. I’d need to be pruned as I pruned – less to more.

Here’s what I journaled at the turning point:

This land is an increase of my lot – more given. More will be required. It will require the best of me, and that’s what scares me. What if there is no “better” me? What if I’m just fooling myself that I can be any different than I am now?

Without God, the answer is – Yes, you are fooling yourself.

With God, the answer is – Anything. You cannot even begin to imagine what I can do in you and through you to go far beyond you. You just have to let me.

As always, the choice was mine. The choice is yours, too. What choice will you make?

We made ours and closed in February … much to the consternation of my gardening muscles and gardening constituency, but more on this second part tomorrow.

Day 41: Gardening Drive

In my blog series on Letting Go, I talked about my curiosity for Roads to Somewhere. Growing up, most of my family vacations involved drives across the country, and my favorite parts of those drives were … MY MIXED TAPES … but also when the drives shifted from highways to byways.

This one time back from Maine, Mom decided to avoid the toll roads completely and take the byways through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York until we hit I-90 somewhere mid-state. This was also the drive where our golden retriever was in heat and the station wagon’s air conditioner stopped working.

But the byways! So many old farmhouses. Years later in high school history, I learned about how northeastern farms were small because of the hills and rocks, and I had this clear visual because we’d driven up and down the Green and White Mountains, and it seemed like stone walls wrapped around all of it.

I’ve never been, but I’m assuming England is the same, thanks to the illustrated James Herriot book I’m reading to Ezra.

“Where do you think those stones came from?” I asked, pointing to one of the stonewalls in the farm scene.

“The ground.”

“Do you think they liked digging out all of those rocks?”

He shrugged. “I like rocks.”

“Isn’t it amazing they built those pretty walls? Wouldn’t it be cool to go see them? Actually, if we drove to New Hampshire we could …”

“Mom, can you finish reading the story? I want to know what happens to the cow.”

There weren’t as many stone walls on the byways around my grandparents’ cabin in Maine, but the turn onto their drive was a Road to Somewhere. It was nondescript, marked by a simple mailbox. If you turned right, you’d be off the byway and on a gravel drive that took you through a pine tree forest to my favorite place.

Where some of my favorite people lived.

On my favorite pond.

I guess from here, I extrapolated. Surely all nondescript roads lead to somewhere special, maybe not a special to more than a handful of people, but that’s the special thing about special. It needs an audience of only one.

There’s a road off of a road in Oxford that leads to a small neighborhood. At the end of the neighborhood, the road turns to gravel and loops left, then right, then left, then right. Off of this road is another. The first time Matt took me here, I almost missed it. And at that point, I was sold.

Day 40: Gardening Muscles

Saturday’s plan was to work on a special gardening project all the day long. Originally, the plan involved a rototiller, but when I saw how difficult it was for the rental men to load it into the van, I questioned my ability to push it and asked them to unload it. One of the men gave me a look. The other man shrugged.

“It’s okay to change your mind.”

Plan B involved a shovel, a lopper, a hoe, and me. By noon, I called it quits and channeled my remaining .01% of energy to take a shower. Then, I crawled onto the hammock for a nap – a risky maneuver for a girl whose muscles had gone to sponge.

I flung my arm (gingerly) across my forehead and remembered this one time in high school gym class they had us check our BMI. They told us women store excess fat in our thighs, hips, and triceps. I remember laughing as I tried to pinch the skin underneath my arms, which is like chasing the wind when you’re 18 and weigh 120 pounds dripping weight.

Fast forward 10 years, and I’m in a knitting phase and shaking loose a skein. I feel something jiggle. There she is – my tricep, waving back a hello.

Fast forward another 10 years, and I’m wielding a hoe against what feels like all the honeysuckle in the land. I raise it high over my head before slamming it into the earth. Dig. Then I jiggle. Dig, jiggle. Dig, jiggle. And not just my triceps, but my bottom, my thighs, and everything else except my ankles. Those are stalwart.

And this is what I was thinking about before I fell asleep on my hammock on Saturday. I’m still thinking about it today – for no reason other than I still have to be careful of every movement – every squat, every forward bend, when I sit, and when I stand.

As soon as I can unload the dishwasher without grimacing, I’ll be back at the earth with my hoe because it turns out that day-long project is actually a multi-day and life-long project I will tell you all about tomorrow … when my forearms are a little more healed up to handle all of this typing.

Day 39: Gardening Rebellion

My first garden was an illegal garden.

Matt and I had just purchased our first place – a brick, one-story, two-bedroom condo in Muncie, Indiana for $85,200. Do we need a moment of silence for a purchase price such as that? Yes. Yes, we do.

[Five seconds in, Five seconds out]

Okay. Every condo came with a front patio – basically, a rectangular cement slab with a fenced pony wall … well, all except for the unit owned by Ricky and Reggie. “The Boys” – as they were collectively known by the condohood – operated a landscaping business and had redesigned their front patio into something more Tuscany, less Muncie. Their pony wall was brick and 10-feet high with an iron gate that opened to a confection of blooms. I once asked Ricky how he got such a variance past the association, and he shrugged.

“Originally, we asked for a 12-foot wall, but we compromised at 10. It’s fine. We just wanted a place where we could sunbathe naked.”

The seeds were planted right then, not for a naked garden, but a garden that looked different than the blah I’d bought with my $85,200. There were rules for how to officially go about these sorts of things, but being your typical last-born child, I didn’t remember where those bylaws had taken themselves off to. If left to me, they would have gone straight into the trash because rules don’t apply to me, but Matt is a firstborn, so I bet he filed them away in an appropriately named folder, like “Condo Files,” organized alphabetically in the file cabinet I’ve been trying to convince Matt to get rid of for the last 18 years because who uses it anyway?

(Matt does.)

So, I didn’t ask for permission. I just took the one gardening tool I had – a 10-inch trowel – and got to work. You might not know this, but Muncie sits atop clay soil, which isn’t the most conducive to planting. I wouldn’t have known this if not for a friend who’d sketched me a gardening plan on a piece of paper, with the accompanying plant names and prices. It would cost me $200, but first I needed to dig out some clay.

I did. I dug at least a foot of clay out of a 10×2-foot bed with my 10-inch trowel, never once thinking maybe I should buy a real shovel. I also didn’t think about what to do with all of this clay other than pile it into what turned out to be 20 plastic garbage bags that I couldn’t lift.

The story ended well. My friend popped on by with a shovel to lend me. Her husband popped on by with his truck to load and dump my 20 bags of clay at a nearby construction site, and I finished the beds with plants that are still some of my favorites to this day.

Did I get a slap on the wrist from the association for my illegal garden? I think so. We might have been fined. Matt probably has the receipt filed away in that cabinet he’s kept around. I thought about asking him, but then I’d be subjected to his re-telling of our illegal garden, otherwise titled, “One Man’s Cautionary Tale of Why Following the Rules is Super-Duper Important” or “The Fine That Could Have Funded Our Children’s Education” or “I Wish She Would Sometimes Just Ask Permission First” or “How My Wife Stops My Life From Being Completely Boring.”

Day 38: Gardening Sounds

I’m on my front stoop at the time of this writing, and if I look up from my laptop, it’s in my line of vision. I really, really, really want to peek up because the sun has hidden behind the clouds all day, but warnings of burnt retinas from eclipses past keep my head low. This is temptation at its finest, people.

I digress.

After dinner, I announced it was gardening time. Rainy days make for loud inside days, and I needed quiet. Matt sent the kids to the basement to play Minecraft while he did dishes, and I headed to the shed for gloves, a bucket, a lawn bag, and whatever the weeding tool is called.

I started in on the bed next to our front walkway, and I noticed outside wasn’t quiet at all. There was the wind against the trees, the tallest of which still don’t have leaves. There were birds – so many more than when quarantine started. The only song I could identify was the coo of the mourning dove (the closest I can get to the loon around these parts).

The sound I tuned into over the next hour was weeding. It’s a three-part choreography where you grasp firmly with one hand, dig deep with the weeding tool in the other, and pull. By its sound, you know whether you did it right. A clear snap means you pulled too hard, but when I hear the micro-sounds of roots unlacing in chain reaction, I know I’ve got it before I see it.

The work I’m doing in the beds now is the trimming, weeding, edging, and clearing I should have done last fall, but last fall was what a lot of us have started to see about our pre-quarantine lives. If now we can’t track the days because they all seem to blend, back then we couldn’t track the days because we couldn’t catch up to them. I often felt behind. Even if I’d made time to garden, it would have felt like another to-do.

I took pleasure in gardening last night, happy that the work I didn’t do last fall was waiting for me this spring. I was happy it didn’t feel work, but an opportunity to engage my senses after being inside all day. I finished weeding and edging the one bed, took my tools back to the shed, and made a gin and tonic as a reward for my “work.” That’s when I noticed the sun and decided to sit on the front stoop to do my writing there.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Day 37: Gardening

After yesterday’s creek excursion ended with two boys in a tussle and one boy pooping his pants, I decided I need to blog about something else for awhile.

Let’s talk gardening! My life feels sort of like a Jane Austen novel anyway, with all the handwritten letters and long walks through field and forest. Gardening fits well in the theme.

Definitions are important here. By “gardening,” I mean digging in the mulch beds that line my house, not a secret garden (alas). By “gardening,” I mean that time period between April and June when I’m pretty amazing at the tending of it all. By “gardening,” I mean benign tinkering where half of what I plant dies because I can’t be bothered with following the instructions on the tags I never really read anyway.

So, if you’re looking for some sort of Midwestern Mulchbed Masterclass, BethTroy&Co is not your stop for next the however many days, but if you’re looking for the Life & Times of a girl who plants with great enthusiasm and little care, subjecting everything she plants to the same watering and fertilization schedule, April-June, before turning it loose to Mother Nature in July, I am your spot. I am your girl. I am your gardener.

And for those of you who like my blog best when I’m talking about my progeny – never fear! I left the house for 30 minutes last night and came back to find this one digging a hole to China in the bed I’d just cleared.

“Hey, Ezra. What are you doing?”

“Digging an aquifer.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know what an aquifer is?”

“I don’t watch as much Mystery Doug as you.”

“It’s water under the ground.”

“Why do we need to access the water underground?”

“So we can build a well.”

“Why do we need a well when water already comes out of the faucet?”

“Because wells are cool, and we can make money.”

At this point, I was too overcome by his gardening fashion to ask for the business plan. It’s not every man who can pull off a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle robe, open and tucked into fleece jammy pants, finished off with shark flip-flips.

Day 36: Kindness

Something set me off on Sunday, which means things had been building for awhile, though I’d been telling myself I’d been dealing with the things as they came in.

Anger is murky like that, and sometimes you don’t see it until that one instance – a word, an action – sets the build-up on fire. You see it then. So do the people around you. It’s felt. It’s hot, sometimes so hot that even a quick, sincere apology does nothing … except maybe piss you off even more.

I went to bed, angry. I woke up, angry. I listened to a sermon, angry. I journaled, angry. I prayed, angry. I didn’t voice my anger directly, but I made it known in dozens of little ways. I told Ezra many times that if he didn’t focus on his schoolwork he’d miss outside fun. He started calling me “Mrs. Future Pants.”

I had no patience with Tommy for his math facts or his repetitive requests for ice cream.

“We don’t have ice cream!” I shouted midway through the afternoon.

“Can I have ice?” he asked.

I gave him a cube, and he munched on it for a few bites.

“Can I have cream?” he asked.

I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

“You are happy!” he exclaimed in victory.

I wasn’t yet, but his compound noun set me toward choices to diffuse the anger instead of fuel it. Maybe I could dig around in the dirt? I took the hoe to the weeds by the back patio for the next hour. Maybe I could try a new recipe? I made naan on the stove and didn’t mind when it burned (and appreciated when the boys ate it, probably because they were still a little scared). Maybe I could take in something sweet? This looked like a sugar cookie and a James Herriot story about a lost lamb revived by a hair dryer.

I had some meetings last night, and by the time I was done talking to my students, I was ready to notice the little things again, like how Ezra piles himself under no less than 6 blankets. When I went to kiss him, only his nose was showing. Jess was still very much awake, and we chatted about what he and his brothers built on Minecraft that day. Tommy also wasn’t falling asleep anytime soon and had kicked off all of his covers. I’d forgotten the laundry, but during my meetings, Matt collected the sheets from the dryer and made the bed. He was also awake and reading Lu2, correcting homonyms (stationery, not stationary).

This morning, I woke up ready to deal with my anger. The next sermon on the dock was, “Kindness.” Funny, and it reminded me that we aren’t the only ones waiting. On the other side of my anger yesterday was God, waiting. He was there when I blocked out the sermon, when I skimmed through scripture, and when I abdicated prayer to stomp through my day. He waited for me to turn back to him with a patience that springs from love – a kind act.

I left this morning’s time grateful, resolved, and ready.

I’m reminded that when I act out of my own reservoir, I’m limited and erratic. I run to empty long before the day is done.

I’m reminded that to give love, I must first receive it. Receiving love is both a choice and a responsibility. It’s not that God didn’t love me in my unlovable yesterday; it’s that I didn’t take it.

I’m reminded that the infinite I receive is the infinite I can give. This love is independent of my circumstances and the people around me. It’s also independent of my actual feelings.

I’m on the lookout, today, and I hope you are, too, for these kind acts – received to extend.

Day 35: Kites

Sundays can drag long in our house, a symptom that pre-dates COVID. So, when I see a Sunday forecast of rain and cold, I want to pour myself a drink.

Mid-afternoon, I escaped into a book, and a couple chapters in I realized I didn’t have to try and drown out the noise anymore. The house was quiet. Everyone else was on the street flying kites.

They’re the $3 kind from Walmart, good for one turn in the sky. We’d bought them for our Michigan vacation last summer, but I guess really, for now.

I put my book down, grabbed my camera and sat in the middle of the street to snap pics of kites too small to see on a grayscale day. If I knew how to use Lightroom, I’d do something cool, like keep the color on the kite while filtering everything else to black-and-white.

Squint and imagine, and you might see a kite. Tune out the ambient noise, and you might just hear a lot of wind and boys laughing.

The kites lasted for 8 minutes, and the fun for 10. It wasn’t a turning point in the day, so much as a point. That’s okay.

We had dinner. I read a Fly Guy book to Tommy, James’ Herriot stories to Ezra, and another chapter of my book to me before falling asleep at 8:30.

Now, it’s Monday! The forecast says sunny and warm, and I’m feeling ready for school, work, and whatever else today will bring. You?