In the time Before Kids, I used to garden. I found pulling the weeds sort of Zen. When I was a kid, my favorite book was The Secret Garden, and when I was burrowing through the weeds to find and learn the plants I wanted to keep in my first grown up yard, I felt like I was channeling Mary Lennox. I got on a kick where I decided that my yard should be edible, so I hacked out the Mugo Pines and the camellias that were trying to take over my front walk, and I replaced them with oregano and sage and rosemary and parsley and chives and lettuce and tea camellias and lavender and lemongrass.

Then I had kids and largely ignored it all for 10 years. I’m sort of delving back into it, but it’s not nearly as zen, because now gardening is punctuated by demands for more screen time, and for snacks, and to find lost toys… I’ve just weathered the latest wave of demands for my attention, and I’m just sitting here on the front walk of my house, looking at the bushy, overgrown mounds of herbs and trying to figure out if it’s a Situation that needs Dealimg with or if it’s in fact what I always hoped it would be when I see this little shape moving through. It’s a tiny little hummingbird flitting amongst the sage flowers (the sage mounds are a particularly vexing problem), and I feel like it’s exactly what it should be, messy, but good.