Noted #14

gardening, dirt, one year, and broken keyboards

Garden season rolls in quickly here in North Carolina, where the climate is a sort of funny mix of “real winter because it actually freezes” and “everything will die in July”. It’s really two short growing seasons for everything except the plants that can tolerate extreme heat, and thus I’ve felt like I was behind since mid February. But as of today my raised beds are planted with greens, herbs, beets, carrots, snap peas, etc… the flowers went in today! I’ve still got squashes, cucumbers, and more pole beans to plant, along with tomatoes and peppers if they actually survive my haphazard milk jug planting. Before I rest on my laurels, I must remember that I need to transplant my beleagured cabbage seedlings and we need to finish a few rows of potatoes and onions in the shared garden. But we’ve gotten a lot of work done. It’s a wonderful thing to have capable helpers — they are at ages where they can do things like fill potato bags with dirt, drill holes in my barrel planters with the impact driver, watch the baby toddle around, and do sundry other tasks. I find that as long as we’re all outside, everyone stays happy for a while, and it’s been a good change of pace. Gardens are the perfect outlet for those of us who want to be outside but sometimes struggle to just “be” without a task. In a perfect world, I’d take long walks in the woods, but in my real world being outside, pulling weeds, watering, and the reward of it actually providing a tangible good for my family is wonderful. It’s also much easier to take a screaming kid back inside from your backyard than it is mid walk in the woods so there’s that.

Bad gardener or bad soil?

It’s amazing how often we take soil for granted. We sometimes say someone’s a good gardener, but I think often what we should say is, “They have good dirt”. Sometimes the people who have good dirt take it for granted. They might even feel a little bit smug for having such lovely greens. Having tried to grow in a few different spaces now, I’m realizing just how few variables I can control. Already in the raised beds at our new house, the germination rate is far surpassing what I got in last year’s garden. Things I couldn’t alter quickly — all the nitrogen tied up in the mulch — governed my results and it was so frustrating. I planted, and re-planted, and weeded and the end result in at least a few beds was a rollicking harvest of my new nemesis, dog fennel. You know that nagging sense that for all the work you’re putting in, you really should be seeing more in the way of results? Life can be quite a bit like that too; sometimes we are working as hard as we can just to eke out something of a harvest from a bad patch of dirt. You have a few choices in this scenario. You can stop trying, or you can keep going, working twice as hard for half the yield, while often wondering if you’re doing something wrong. Soil is like generational wealth — a gardener who’s composted and tilled, balanced nitrogen, and tended to pests impacts the health of plants for years to come. You can’t see that just looking at the ground, but you know it’s there when you try to grow something. There will be signs.

So here’s a little note to say maybe you’re not doing it — life or the garden — wrong, but you might have started with bad soil, and soil amendment takes time.

While we’re talking about dirt, here’s a poem about dirt¹.

this is fertile soil, they say
you could grow something here 

this is a fancy way of saying, 
looks like good dirt
tracked in,
spread out, 
blown into the crevices. 

Puttering

I had to laugh at this note that Kerri Christopher shared, because my work process has never been described so accurately. My preferred method of getting things done is not to work through a check list like a normal person but to sort of circulate the house in concentric circles. The problem with this is that when I have all the loops open — all the circles have a task started — and then I get interrupted by an urgent need, it can feel like all I’ve done is create chaos when the reality is that I’ve just got a lot of tasks halfway started. I’ve had to learn to adapt some of my processes, but if someone took live footage of the way I spent a few hours in the house alone they might be confused by my workflow. I’ve learned over the years that having something to listen to helps me focus if it’s a task like cleaning the bathroom, but in general I often find it challenging to just do the next thing. I wonder how many brains actually process this way and how much mothering — especially the immediate needs of small children — makes this even more difficult. The idea of being forced to do certain activities at a certain time always chafes, even though most days we end up doing the same things at about the same times. Then again, if I have no structure at all I fall apart. I think time blocking with a list of things to accomplish within the time block is probably the approximation of how I work best. It’s almost like I have to sneak up on my bouts of productivity so I don’t scare them away. If I can convince myself to just do the one thing, I’ll almost always do two, but problems with analysis paralysis and gaining inertia are real.²

One Year

We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of being confirmed into the Catholic Church. I still stand by this piece I wrote last May.

What I do know is that the person of Christ has never been more apparent or present to me than over the last several months. I don’t think there’s been a time in my life where I’ve been more consistent or persistent in prayer or Bible reading. People have asked about my experience with Confirmation and the best I can muster is that it’s like I’d been playing a grand piano with the lid down my whole life, and someone finally opened the top. The song is the same, the person of Jesus is the same, there’s just more of it.

Please do remember candidates and catechumens in your prayers as they prepare to walk through Holy Week. It’s a special time, but can feel really fraught.

“I” broke

My keyboard broke last week. If we’re being specific, “i” broke. As in the letter. It wouldn’t register any more no matter how hard I tapped it. I dutifully removed the keycap and tried to clean it out to no avail. Do you know how many words use the letter “i”?

After I got done being annoyed, it was a huge relief. I can’t write anything! I can’t respond to things on Notes! I can’t post Notes! Hallelujah! I guess I’ve felt this “I am so tired” tug for quite some time, but I kept trying to convince myself that things were working. The reality is that the math has just not been math-ing lately. I don’t know what this means for the future, but at least until some other commitments are wrapped up I’m putting the newsletter on hiatus. The last two years have been full of huge changes, and within the last few months it’s like I slammed into a brick wall. I just want to plant seeds, and pull weeds, and read books and not tell anyone about it. I want to take pictures that I don’t share, and write in a journal that no one sees. I want to stop caring about my open rate, and not be hit with hot takes about stressful topics when I open the computer.

I was waffling over this decision when the hilarity of the fact that it was “I” that broke struck me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m very dense, or if God just knows that I appreciate wordplay. It was clear as day. “I broke”. Everyone has a breaking point where the thing just isn’t working anymore, and no matter how hard you hit the dang key, it doesn’t produce the same result as before. I tend to be hard on things like bluetooth keyboards and myself. I don’t have a lot of hope for the bluetooth keyboard but I think time offline will be just what “I” need.

I’ll be back in your inbox when writing sounds fun again, which will definitely be after a few commitments get wrapped up.

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This letter is free for you to read, but costs time and brain cells to write. If you’d like to support this work please like it, leave me a comment, or share with a friend. I’m so glad you’re here!

When I say that part about “share with a friend” I really do mean it. If you know of someone that might appreciate this essay, or might enjoy my writing, would you take a moment to shoot it to them in a text, or forward this e-mail? Word of mouth remains the very best way for writers and readers to find each other, and it also keeps me from wasting time in social media feeds :)

I’ll be pausing paid subscriptions while I’m on hiatus, but if you’re currently a paid subscriber you’ll have access to all the archives. If you’d like to cheer me on, or just buy me some Easter chocolate (dark, please) you can do that here:

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Lately:

last raised bed, radishes and peas, a luna moth found coming home from chores, everything is better on the porch, back to soccer, first pedicure in 9 years, janky planters need drainage, every day is an egg hunt if you let the chickens out...

Listening: This “How to better channel your big black trash bag energy” episode was quite genius. I had a moment like this recently after we got over the stomach flu, and this idea of naming the invisible problem is very helpful. I’m kind of in a podcast funk where I’ve been clicking out of most things, so maybe that just means I need some silence?

Reading: I’m slowly getting into Kristen Lavransdatter. I think I’m finally hooked so I shall report back, but finding the time to read has been tricky because I don’t have a digital copy. I finished Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and while there were many parts I loved, I guess she has a tendency to write endings that make me feel conflicted? I feel sort of similarly about this ending as I did Tom Lake’s. If you’ve read it, please chime in My overall feeling was, “Wait, what?”

Cooking: Hamburger season is back, thank goodness. We got our first couple cows back from the butcher a month or two ago and I have to say they are delicious. I’m looking forward to having some spring veggies to add in the next month. If you need a slam dunk allergen free cinnamon roll recipe for Easter, this is your unicorn right here. I make them with the non-dairy condensed milk, but regular butter.

Farm Life: Watching little kids with chickens never gets less funny. In general, our older children have more plans for things than I can mentally cope with. Just this week I’ve had to entertain conversations about chicken breeding, the dog that they are “definitely” going to get as soon as our current dog is totally trained, and how much a rabies shot costs because they are totally prepared to take on financial responsibility. So many plans. So many children. So many animals. Pray for me ;)

1. I’ve decided that March is just dust season here — once all the grass comes in then things settle down, but for now it’s just sandy dirty and SO much pollen.

2. I wrote some of the things that work or have worked for me in this post, “Idealist in the Real World”