The Good, the Best

There was never really a chance that this spring would look anything like the springs of years past. Life with a newborn would be enough to change the normal trajectory of the season; add in Christopher’s school schedule and it was obvious that this was not the year to go about business as usual.

Normally, by mid-April, we are chomping at the bit to get seeds in the ground. Waiting out the unpredictable false springs of East Tennessee is something of an art, and one that has taught us patience. The temptation is to jump on the first or second or even third warm spell as being a definitive change. It never is, though. There’s always a crazy jag of freezing nights or too much rain or something that puts all your efforts back to zero. So we set May 1 as our official Earliest Planting Date here, and it hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

This year, though, May 1 will be just another day. (Well, except for the fact that it’s Jude’s birthday!) We have no seed packets stacked in the big planning envelope, no hand-drawn map for the garden, no need to get the tiller ready. We won’t be gardening at all this summer, unless we decide to plunk a few cucumber and zucchini plants in pots. It’s a strange feeling, but also one that feels absolutely, undeniably wise. Our days right now are dominated by a rhythm of school, nurse, feed people, tidy house, wash clothes, repeat. The bandwidth for planting and weeding and maintaining and ultimately preserving simply doesn’t exist.

It feels odd, this lack of planning and anticipation. If I’m totally honest, it’s a mix of emotions. There’s a certain sense of freedom. Gardening on the scale we have in the past is a huge time investment and requires a full family effort  and daily upkeep. But that freedom is tempered with a disappointment as I process a reality of no fresh vegetables, no harvesting in the cool of the evenings with my family, and no winter delight of a random batch of pumpkin bread made from a bag of purée pulled from our freezer.

Sometimes, you sacrifice the good for the best. That’s how this spring feels. Over the next few months, we will focus on Alice growing, on Christopher checking off boxes in the pursuit of his Masters degree, on our family stepping into the next phase of our lives— separately and together. I wish this season had room to hold baskets of cucumbers waiting to be sliced and piles of green beans waiting to be stashed in the freezer. Those are really good things, things I value and things that bring me joy.

But they’re not the best thing.

Life demands a set of priorities, a pecking order for our own sanity and our limited time. That means that good things, well… they are sometimes set aside in favor of the best. It happens all the time. Maybe it’s happening to you right now. I used to fight this, used to feel that if I could only wrestle more hours from the day, or force my obligations into neat compartments that never overflowed, then I wouldn’t have to walk away from things that I knew were good. I was wrong. In trying to cram in all that we hope for, we usually just shortchange everything we put our hands to, as well as ourselves.

So no garden this year. Instead, a time of growing something else: our contentment in this new phase of life. I think that’s the best, and I’m looking forward to living it out.