Today, for the first time in two months, I worked in my yard. Why so long, you might ask? Two reasons. First, I really hate yard work. Like really hate it. Ooh....which reminds me of a story. As you may or may not know, in our church we have a lay clergy. That means no one is paid to do anything, so members must share the work to keep the church functioning. One of those shared tasks is speaking in Sacrament Meeting. Other churches, I believe, call this "preaching" or giving the "sermon" or "homily." We call it "giving a talk," and everyone gets his or her turn eventually. For the record, it's my absolute favorite thing we do in our church. I am in a tiny minority, however. It seems most people don't like to speak in front of others. But I really do love it.
Anyway, last week in church, our neighbor, Gus (who lives directly across the street from us), gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting. Now you should know something about Gus. He LOVES yard work. And he loves his yard. And, consequently, it is positively beautiful. It seriously looks like a yard right out a gardening magazine. In Gus's talk, he taught about the need to nurture our faith and testimonies with constant care, just as one must provide constant and loving care for one's yard in order to have a good result. As an introduction, he explained how much he loves to work in his yard: "If I had the choice to spend an entire week either working in my yard or going on vacation, I would choose to work in my yard." Okay, this made me laugh. Right there in Sacrament Meeting, where I was trying to be all quiet and reverent, all I could think of was "If I had the choice to spend an entire week either working in my yard or going to prison.....uh, prison might look pretty good." The painfully sad situation for people like Gus is that he does hours upon hours of work to create this exquisite yard, and I reap all the benefits. I get to gaze out my front room window at this lovely work of art, while poor Gus must look across the street at our disaster! Totally unfair.
Moving on, the second reason I haven't worked in my yard in two months is because of Baby Swen's surprise arrival a month early. Before that, I really was trying. I was. About a week before Swen was born, the Monsons (Matt's parents) came over and spent a whole evening working on my yard. They weed-whacked, they pruned, they dug, they trimmed. They are just incredible. They are so good at this stuff, and as a result, their yard looks very much like Gus's. Why did they come and spend all that time and effort on my behalf? We joked that it must be because Mathew lives here, and they couldn't stand the thought of their son living in a house with such a crappy yard. But I don't think that's it. I think they did it because they are that type of people, naturally generous and giving. Anyway, the yard was on its way to looking better by that point; I thought I had this beast under control. And then Swen came along, and priorities shifted.
As you know, Swen was born early because Shulamith developed a life-threatening condition called HELLP Syndrome. Even after Swen was delivered by emergency C-section, she was still very sick. And even four days later when we came home from the hospital, she was weak. Her platelets had not yet recovered, and she was terribly anemic. Just walking up the stairs from her apartment to our house made her dizzy. Add this to the fact that she brought home a preemie who weighed not even quite five pounds, and you can see how she needed lots of help. You can be sure that yard work was the furthest thing from my mind during those early weeks. And the weeds grew and grew.
Fortunately, she is all better now. She once again has color in her face. She has energy. We even went back to the gym this week. Swen is growing even faster than my weeds, and he even slept four hours in a row last night! Woo hoo! So today, even in the nearly 100 degree heat, I figured I'd better get out and face that nasty yard once again. The weekend of Shulamith's rescheduled baby shower and Swen's blessing is in just two weeks. The pressure is on. After mowing and watering, I pulled all the weeds from the front of the house and the parking strip. I still need to weed out the island garden and prune the daisies there, but I definitely made progress. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have 16 essays that need to be graded sitting on your living room floor. Ahh, but that's another story. For another day.
Happy weed-whacking, everyone!
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