Our yard

On the 23rd day, I’m grateful for our yard.

By the time I was born, we still had 33 acres of land from the original 120, the difference having been sold off in crisis sized increments over the decades before I was born. But we didn’t have a yard – not really. We had the part of the land we cut with a lawnmower and the part we cut with the bush-hog and the part that had cows or was the garden. But we didn’t have a “yard”.

My great-aunt had a proper yard – with a fence around it and foundation plantings and all of that. So did the people who owned the grocery store my grandmother had worked at. I remember they had rose bushes in the corner of a giant zoysia lawn, with concrete stepping stones crossing it, going from the driveway to their front door. I had never seen stepping stones before then, and of course every time we went over I would pretend the grass was burning hot lava and I would hop from stone to stone, unscathed.

They also had a huge covered front porch, with a swing on one end, and I dreamed of one day being rich enough to have my own porch swing.

From 1990 until 2013, I lived in places (like apartments) that didn’t have yards, or places where I didn’t have control of the yard (like duplexes). But in 2013, we bought a house. With a yard.

It was just under a 5th of an acre – 50 feet by 150 or so. The front yard was 50×25. I didn’t care – Over the five years we lived there, I turned it into a riotous cottage garden, packed with raspberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, roses, crabapples, black-eyed Susan’s, chickens, irises, and more. And there were concrete stepping stones across the tiny strip of lawn that led from the driveway to our front door.

Sadly, it was really my yard, not ours. Try as she might, Renee never really felt safe in that yard, alone. So while she appreciated it, there was no real sense she enjoyed being in it. She wouldn’t sit on the porch and hang out, for example.

Well, partly it was that she didn’t feel safe – but also we had a neighbor across the street who had poor boundaries. I lived across from him for two years, and never knew his name – he told us to call him “Moose”, and he had the habit of appending the word “Baby” to my name and calling Renee “darlin”.

“Hey, Hugh Baby!” he would shout across the street when I would walk out on the porch to check the mail. He did not have air conditioning, so he would sit on his porch shirtless and in boxer shorts most of the summer, shouting at people driving by and talking to people on his speaker phone. It added that special something to the experience. He would shout across the street – a distance of maybe 75 feet, porch to porch, rather than come over to talk.

One day I was doing something in my yard, and the roses were all abloom and it was just a carnival of color. This must have impressed Moose, because he walked out of his house, saw me, and yelled, “Hugh Baby, you are one green thumb motherfucker!”

Part of mine and Renee’s agreement moving here was that if we were going to disrupt our lives and move literally halfway across the continent, she got to pick the house. When we moved here, the housing cost differential was such that we could afford and bought a much more suburban-sized ranch house, with a large half acre yard on a quiet street, a street where people park in driveways and not on the curb, a street where people walk their dogs and will stop and chat with you as they go by. And most importantly, it’s a yard she feels safe spending time in.

Cottage garden is still my preferred aesthetic, but it takes longer in such a large yard. But it’s coming – there are rose bushes and bottle trees and vine covered arbors and metal folk art in the front yard, including a three-foot-tall metal chicken, and in the spring, daffodils and paper whites and in summer, tons of cosmos and zinnias.

Our fenced in backyard is in process, with a large potager garden going in this winter, and my workshop and the chicken coop and fire pit, and a wildlife border surrounding the whole thing.

It doesn’t have a huge front porch, but last year, I built an arbor and a swing in the shade of our huge magnolia tree. Most afternoons, Renee will sit in the swing and listen to music on her headphones and just enjoy the space. I will often take a break around then, and go out and sit with her, and we will watch the hummingbirds and the butterflies and chat with the people who walk by.

And our neighbors across the street here still yell at me when they see me, but they are six and three and they shout and dance and wave until you notice them and wave back, and how could anyone ever be upset at that?

The never ending project

The last house we lived in was what is politely called a “fixer-upper”. Before we could move into it, we had to rip out all the carpet, put in new floors, renovate the kitchen and get all new (or at least, new to us) appliances.

But that was just the starting point.

It had been a low-income rental for more than a decade, and while the house itself was structurally sound, no one had loved it in a very, very long time. The yard was dismal. Hard, compacted soil, with desire paths across the yard where the neighbors would shortcut through it. A backyard that was filled with privet and briars and fallen trees.

Then there was the leaky roof, the sunken front porch, the rotten bathroom floor… It required a lot of vision to see what could be.

We lived in that house for five years. I ripped out the bathroom floor and tiled it. Renovated the studio apartment in the basement and rented it out. Put fencing and flower beds in the front yard. Built a porch across the front of the house. Built a chicken coop in the backyard. Put in a rose hedge along the road. Ripped out the privet and cleaned up the backyard. Pulled the aluminum siding off the front of the house, discovering shiplap siding in perfect condition underneath, which we painted. Replaced the leaky roof with a metal one. And lots of other, smaller things I am forgetting.

And along the way we hosted friends, had celebrations, had a niece live with us for 6 months or so, and my wife had a heart transplant. That house treated us very well. We loved it, and it kept us safe. And when we had to leave it, we were fortunate enough to sell it to a friend, who would love it too.

I have to confess: I didn’t have any vision. I just knew that this is what we could afford, and that if we loved the house and took care of it, it would take care of us. This is sort of my way of working – I don’t invest heavily in long-term plans. I usually just have a long-term broadly defined goal – in this case, a happy, safe, home that would serve as a sanctuary for us. And then, after setting that goal, I ask myself, what can I do now to move me toward it?

These days, we are in a different house, in a different state. This house was more or less move in ready when we bought it, barring some minor updates in the kitchen and a lot of painting. But this house has a ½ acre of yard, and it was a rental before we bought it. Again – structurally sound, but unloved for a long time.

And again, I don’t have a grand vision. I just want it to be welcoming. To be safe, and to keep us safe. To be a place of rest, of sanctuary, for both us and the birds and the pollinators and the other wildlife that share this place with us. So the question isn’t, “What is the next thing to do on this long list” but, “What can I do, in this moment, to move me closer to that vision?”

I find that empowering in many ways. The first is that I don’t always have $3,000 to build the workshop I needed in the backyard, but maybe I do have the $20 to buy a rosebush or native vine. Maybe it’s been raining for weeks, like it does in the spring here, and so I can’t till the new flower bed, but I can paint the hallway. And living in a place changes how you interact with it, which means that your first year in a house, you don’t know enough about the place to make a list of what you want to change about it.

It also helps me avoid the temptation to believe the false idea that I will only be happy when it’s finished. After all, if it has to be finished for me to be happy – well, that could take years. And science tells us that the anticipation of a trip brings more satisfaction than does the actual trip itself.

So, I don’t have a set date for completion. Instead, I choose to see my house and yard as works in progress, a never ending project, and thus, a never ending source of joy.