Painfully Obvious Metaphors: Crazy Prairie Edition
Since setting is important, I'm going to tell you about my house. It overlooks the river and, on clear days, four mountains. We bought it for the acre-ish of yard for our then-hypothetical progeny to go benignly feral in. We mowed. We pruned the fruit trees. We put in raised beds that yielded even more phallic than usual cucumbers.
And then we had said progeny. Twins. Our two-for-one recession special. The equation of keeping two tiny humans alive plus Marc's job plus my job plus two books plus--true confession--a familial tendency toward laziness and procrastination equaled near total neglect of the yard.
So now we have a prairie. Tall, wild grass worthy of Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Grass taller than my kiddos. Grass taller than me. Grass completely inappropriate for allegedly with-it adults who have proper grownup careers, a mortgage, and a sense of actual aesthetics.
It's bad, folks. (The kids like it though. They bat it down in places for mazes and palaces and it's really good for hide and seek.)
So bad. We have actually looked into renting goats to eat it down to nothing for a fresh start.
Obviously, should it come to that the blog will feature the goats.
Goats or no, we have best intentions of slowly getting things back under control. Marc mows. Aggressively. And this weekend, in the spirit of you have to start somewhere, I weeded. Two hours in one hundred degree heat because when you've put something off for months, of course you start in the most uncomfortable circumstances possible. I barely made a dent. No one else would notice a difference. Like I said, it's pretty much a prairie and who the hell weeds a prairie? But I cleared space around the lavender plant I put in years ago and lo and behold the thing is thriving. So that’s a start.
Also, a platform for a painfully obvious metaphor. Pick your poison:
Gradual reclamation of the yard as a metaphor for the slow, constant labor of turning mind-chaos into a book.
Gradual reclamation of the yard as a metaphor for parenting and prioritizing.
Gradual reclamation of the yard--with bonus thriving lavender!--as metaphor for good intentions remaining sound despite the entropy of everyday life.
All of them are impossibly cheesy; squint a little and all of them are true.
Anyhow, it felt good to start.
