From This Dirt Forward

It’s early June.  School’s out.  My husband’s beaming.  I’m envious… and wary.

While I have zero interest in teaching derivatives and integrals to smug high school students, I have a huge amount of interest in my husband’s summer vacation.  As a wannabe full-time gardener who barely has enough time to de-wilt the flowers each evening after work, I am burdened with irrepressible envy for my husband’s project-filled summers.

Last Friday I arrived home after work thinking that Doug would want to celebrate his last day of school by going out for a nice dinner and then enjoying a quiet and relaxing evening.

I should’ve known.  Instead, I found him in the front yard with a big piece of machinery and an even bigger grin on his face.  Of course.  Doug chose to celebrate his first weekend of the summer by renting a mini-excavator.  

Doug initiating our patio project with a Dingo, four-wheeler, and trailer

One of the things I love the most about my husband is his creative energy.  I know that I will never be a wife who complains that her husband is a couch potato and never does anything around the house.  Doug is a doer.

However, one of the things that exasperates me the most as the wife of said husband is when he uses this creative energy to do something I don’t want done, or more commonly, don’t want so overdone.  He has a track record of turning a small trim job along the lane into an all-day chainsaw massacre.  There is nothing calculated or restricted about his “controlled burns.”  And now, digging out sod for a small patio has turned into Doug’s very own “Big Dig”.  Although admirable, his eagerness to pursue home projects is worrisome for the wife who’s at work all day wondering what her husband is up to in her (as she likes to think) gardens.

One of the biggest challenges of gardening together is that we both want to be head of the estate, when in reality, we are equal partners.  In other areas of our home, there is an unspoken division of power.   I don’t tell Doug how to organize the garage and he doesn’t tell me how to decorate the kitchen, even though I still tinker and Doug still cooks.  But when it comes to our lawn and garden we have almost no mutually agreeable gender roles.  When our ideas, desires and ethics differ, as they often do, we must compromise—an art that doesn’t come easy to us Newlyweds.

I still think I’m 15 with my own unlimited garden space and unlimited plant material allowed by my easy-going single dad and his greenhouse business.  I am not accustomed to negotiating neither my garden plans nor my meticulous manual management strategies.  Doug grew up working on his family’s 100-acre farm, growing vegetables on a commercial scale.  Today, he manages our 3 acres as if they were 100, avoiding any activity ending with the feared words “by-hand.”   I shovel (by-hand); he rents an excavator.  I use a wheelbarrow (by-hand); he uses a four-wheeler.  I weed with a weed fork (by-hand); he mixes round-up in a boom sprayer.

Annie working on the patio project with a shovel and wheelbarrow

With his rented Dingo, Doug spent much of the weekend removing sod and excavating dirt for my big landscaping project in the front yard.  I very much appreciated his tedious efforts, but also realized that I needed to pull on his reigns if I wanted to maintain control of my project.  I gave a well-received lecture about how much time and thought I’d put into planning this project and how much I was looking forward to doing the construction.  I emphasized, “I’m the project manager—The Brain and you’re the laborer—The Muscle.  The Muscle can’t work properly without The Brain.” Being the wonderful man that he is, he agreed to let the patio project rest on weekdays.

Maddie might love summer vacation (and trailer loads of topsoil) even more than The Muscle

But since The Muscle isn’t allowed to lay flagstone while I’m at work, he has to find something else to do.

Monday, the first day of his summer vacation, I received the following email at 1:53 PM:

Subject:  You whoooo…

“Uh ohhhhh… the muscle has been at it again….”

And so begins the summer adventures of The Muscle and The Brain.  Every weekday for the next 10 agonizing weeks, The Brain will be sitting at her office desk wondering if The Muscle is up to an “Oh no!” or an “Oh yeah!” 

Stay tuned…