Friends, today the gardening bucket came out. Little and I share a love of plants and sunlight and green things growing that Big One just doesn't comprehend. Little and I trimmed and carried dead stuff to the compost. We made room for small things trying to poke their way up through dead leaves and mulch. We basked in the sunlight and counted freckles. No small task.Today at Big's French teacher's house, we met five new Tunis lambs, dark brown and tiny. We watched and waited, hoping the last ewe might give birth right there, right then.
Today it is 60 degrees, on the shady side of my house. Today we walked to Big One's music lesson. There are buds popping on the trees, everywhere and every color... purple and red, gray green and chartreuse.
And today, for the first time, my sisyphean editing project began to feel possible. I have developed a modicum of efficiency. I am learning to move on when there's a nut I can't crack, and keep going through the material. I am more than half way done.
I feel I need to explain something: I am not actually doing any editing. If I were actually honing prose, or even rewriting, I would be having fun. I really love playing with words. In fact, what I am doing is fact checking. And I will spare you the details, but these facts that I'm checking? Let's just say that it would be hard to find less interesting material. So I am finding myself spending inefficient hours learning things I just don't want to know.
But today? Today even that's okay, and today it seems like I will eventually learn to integrate this work into the rest of my life, and put it in the back seat where it belongs.
6 comments:
Ah, so that's where you were coming from. I saw all the gardening stuff in the yard as I ran past. I hated gardening when I was younger, mainly because I was given the task of weeding, and never got to do anything that felt productive or fun.
LOL! I still hate it. I am with Big on this -- I'll do laundry or scrub floors happily, but gardening? Not joyfully. Just what absolutely has to be done. Hurray for you and Little -- it gives the rest of us great stuff to look at.
Uh... Mom? I have some laundry that needs doing, and I might have a floor or two around here that you could scrub.
Just kidding... I tend to neglect the inside chores this time of year.
As long as it'll keep me out of the garden, I'm all for it!
I hear you on having to read stuff you'd rather not! I just finished editing a book that had a somewhat interesting premise, but it was filled with statements that teetered on the edge of being offensive, such as that certain cultures might be genetically less advanced than "modern" ones. Thank god I didn't have to fact check that one!
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