foundation of the house and in the fall use the leaf blower to keep the leaves off the lawn, which is an impossible task. I haven’t, however, seeded a proper lawn the way he has with seed bought at the local hardware store. I haven’t fertilized or feed or aerated as I’m suppose to. I haven’t used herbicide or weed killers. Instead, I let the dandelions grow tall, go to seed, and then blow their cottony seeds into the warm summer air. I’ve let the wild daisies bloom where they will and the crab grass to take over. I don’t mind the purple clover or the bumblebees they attract, which are good for pollinating the garden. If my father ever came to visit, he’d be ashamed of my lawn and tell me that it says something about my character, that I’m either too lazy or too lax or too careless. But I think it says something completely different, that I’m not so afraid that things will get out control so much that I’ll lose myself. That a little wildness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That I don’t have to pay attention to the way things are supposed to be.
When we drive to the house now on the weekends, every once in awhile we’ll see Pam planting flowers around the posts that stand on either side of their gravel driveway. She smiles at us as enthusiastically as she did on that first day we met. In the winter, Earl plows our driveway, and if we’re around, we’ll step out on to the front stoop and chitchat about the weather or business at the diner or the endless improvements we need to finish on the house.
And once we leave the city behind, I let myself go until Monday morning when I have reassume my proper selves and behave the way I’m expected to behave.
August 3rd
I'm a dreamer. I think the impossible is possible. The unrealistic plausible. I have no qualms believing that I can be that which I have no right to claim to be.
I've assumed my fancifulness came out of nowhere, an anomaly in a family of practical people with down-to-earth ideas and sensible lives. But I have a faint memory of midway games taking up precious space in the living room and my mother's irritation at her husband for depositing them there.