Gardening and ennui

Anticipating poor weather two weekends ago, I spent an embarrassing amount of a surprisingly sunny Saturday staring out my back kitchen window at the backyard. I was looking for something to do with the garden, but there really wasn't anything to do. What could be planted at this point in the season had been, and our washing machine was entirely covered with sprouting tomato plants growing in leftover salad clam shells and yogurt cups. With straw still covering much of the raised beds, there were no weeds to pluck.

I couldn't shake the feeling of wanting to conjure up some new project, to make something from scratch out there. If all goes well, there will be plenty to do out there later in the summer. But much of the appeal of gardening for me - besides the part that stocks my kitchen - is satisfying my inner homo faber. Faced with significant projects of the mind, like my Sisyphean task of book editing, or simply figuring out how to reinvent my post-academic self, I have craved doing things that are concrete and finite in duration. Buying a house created a rush of all sorts of these little projects. A shelf is needed so up one goes. The kitchen is too small, so I screw up peg board and hang my pots. Going to Home Depot, once the utter definition of tedium for me, is moderately pleasant -- if still a time suck so profound that I think Home Depot exists on another dimension of space-time.

It's the same feeling that attracted me to cooking as a serious pursuit. In a few hours, the dish is done and the reviews are in from fellow diners. The tinkering I do takes hours instead of months, and the direction for improvements along the way is usually obvious to me at this point: More salt. Lower heat. More acid. If the dish disappoints, make it again or don't and move on to something else.

The garden is much cooler than cooking because instead of rearranging molecules a bit on the stove I'm producing something entirely new that wasn't there before. But it's living new things and I can't do anything in a Saturday to make them ta-da, done!  That's fine. Patience is part of this game. But I hope this enterprise simply becomes another avenue to become impatient with myself.

My wife had a TA in college who got a bearded collie. Because this dog is a herding breed he felt sorry for the pup and bought a sheep for it at a local livestock auction. But he bought just one sheep, which probably didn't make the bearded collie feel any better or more inclined to herd in the first place. I have no idea what came of this guy's career as a scholar. I'm just glad I have a really small back yard.