What I Did on My Summer Vacation...Sort of

I think I did this vacation all wrong.

While Patrick took good care of the People at Sundance, some 1500 miles away, I tended to all things land-connected here at home, releasing the chickens into their feathery pecking day each morning and tucking them in at dusk while gleaming pairs of raccoon eyes peered out from the thicket hoping for a chance at a robust meal. Thankfully, the wire-wrapped coop continued to do its job for the fourteen days I was on my own, letting me focus on a few landscaping projects of the heavy-lifting variety.

Here’s how it went for the first few days: I’d get up before the sun had even nudged the horizon and wheel the garden cart to the half-acre plot behind the house, toting a shovel, rake, lopers and trimmers to tame the thistle and quack grass creeping hungrily toward the raised beds. In my mind, the plan was to frame this area in a wooden pallet border, leaving a couple of gaps for easy entry gates and then reinforce it with rolls of welded metal fencing to slow down the midnight marauders who like nothing better than to dig up our sweet Cherokee Purple and Atomic Grape tomato plants, still too young to even sport a blossom. Before Patrick left, I scrounged successfully for the majority of the pallets I’d need, hitting the mother lode with one supplier who is willing to trade pallets for granola. And she’s kind to boot—don’t you just love people sometimes?

One pallet, one t-post at a time, the garden wall grew and if you squinted a bit, it looked mostly straight. I wasn’t going for a photo shoot finish, just something modestly functional that maybe we’d paint one of these days, or years. Something whimsical, like sunflowers from the ‘60s or a mural depicting a tree going through the four seasons (I’ll keep you posted). As I hoisted the heavy post driver over my head to thread it onto the tall tip of a post, I spoke aloud my promise to Patrick: no injuries, no trips to the ER. Only once, in a weary moment, one of the handles of the post driver bumped into my cheek as I lifted it up and off of the freshly-placed post. Thanks to chaos theory, physics and possibly some garden muses on full alert, my face sported no bruise that would need explaining when I got back to work.

Before you get all impressed, it’s important to note that I paused each day’s progress around 8:00am., roughly three hours into it, and spent way too much time after that scrolling through the day’s news and purposeless videos, wandering the house missing Patrick, and wondering what to make for dinner. On one particularly hot and humid Wednesday, I sat as motionless as I could on the couch, feeling regret and self-care approval in equal measure. Getting up to draw the curtains and finally turn on the window AC unit was a big deal that day.

In past years, when I had this much time stretched out before me and no one to share it with, I rolled out grandiose plans that included the Wild and Never-Tried, like taking myself out to lunch in a more upscale restaurant, throwing a couple of sleeping bags in the back of the truck and driving out to one of the best places in the field to star-gaze all night and keeping the sink free of dishes (I’m ok to set the bar low on that one—there’s nothing quite like waking up on vacation to a clean kitchen). With Patrick safely tucked away on the reservation, miles away and out of sight, I’d schedule much-needed home improvement projects like extending the front deck and adding new steps, remodeling the kitchen and painting the bathroom. I missed him of course, but also knew he’d never approve of the way I’d approach these secret plans. The year of the kitchen remodel, I needed to prep the area for the contractors while he was still here, so he did see the refrigerator and the tea hutch in the living room but had no idea where the rest of that project was heading. One year I changed the locks on the doors and he came home early (around 1:00a.m.) unable to get in until he’d tossed a few pebbles at the upstairs bedroom window, startling me out of a sound slumber. Sigh…those were the days…

But this year, I felt rudderless and set adrift on a sea of no motivation save for those pallets and a loosely shaped image of clearing the ridge above the meadow. A reality had come home to roost—I was no longer thirty-something with energy to spare, able to set my hands and shoulders to multiple heavy lifting tasks for hours and need only a quick tuna salad sandwich before heading out to finish hand-weeding the 20’ x 60’ garden rows down by the creek. Three hours in the pre-dawn cool of the day is my limit now and somewhere in the past twenty-three years I acquired a cell phone, which hasn’t helped matters. What held fast to my heart, though, for the duration of this vacation was a weighty glimpse of what life might be like without my man, an uncomfortable mix of retirement and widow practice. I sat on the curb-gleaned wooden platform glider looking into the mouth of the meadow and an empty future. I couldn’t shake it for days.

To be fair, I could also claim pandemic and world news fatigue as backdrop to this year’s vacation malaise (it’s been an especially rough couple of weeks if you support the moral direction of the left). One particular day’s headline gave me enough rage to obliterate a tough thicket of ruthless brambles beneath a grove of mulberry saplings. Sweaty and spent, I dumped the last load of thorny sticks from the garden cart and strode back to the house, a new sense of purpose in hand. I looked over my shoulder at tidy pallet garden enclosure and knew that difficult things were indeed possible. Not the two-week vacation take-away I’d imagined, but I’ll take it nonetheless.

I did make it to our local farmers’ market one Saturday (the one down the road where our granola made its debut; not the one where we sell now) and savored the moseying pace of it all. I saw a couple of familiar vendors and visited with them a while, buying the most excellent blueberry cookies I really shouldn’t eat (but did anyway—I’m gluten-free now; another story for another time) and a wonderfully whimsical nesting star from the talented fiber artist who spins wool from her own carefully tended flocks. Filled with airy bits of dyed wool, it now hangs from a shepherd’s hook on the ridge and the house wrens pluck wisps from to soften their stick-pokey homes. It was good to connect, to be on the other side of the table, buying instead of selling and catching up on the local news. Back at the farm, I’d have a go at taming the shaggy lawn under a brilliantly blue sky and do some impulsive baking after I’d washed stray bits of grass from my hands. For reasons I don’t need to understand, all that helped me feel better, and bonus—I still had a week of vacation to go.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this long two-week stretch of time all to myself and I wonder if, on some random Thursday back at the office, I’ll have pangs of regrets for squandering too much of it. Best not to dwell on that now—there’s a bird feeder and raccoon party going on outside and a few more areas beneath the trees that need to be cleared. I’ll keep my orbit a bit wider around that nesting star so I don’t disturb the wren’s busy agenda. From my view on the deck, I could watch them for hours.

And when I get back to the office, I’ll do what I always do that first day on the job after a vacation—submit a request for the next one.