Messy House & Overgrown Flower Beds

coming to peace with what's undone

When I moved into my house almost ten years ago, it was neglected. Overgrown.

The old owners had died. The house was inherited.

It was put on the market and it didn’t sell for a long time.

The wife of the past owner told me how beautiful this property used to be.

Her eyes got soft and watery as she described the pints of raspberry jam her husband and his family used to make.

She talked about the fruit from the trees heavy in their hands.

About dahlias as big as dinner plates.

About how they would sink into the autumn’s beauty when the workload lightened.

Her eyes like blue stones at the bottom of the river as she remembered what it had been and what it could be again.

My singular focus for years was to fix this house and the land up.

Prune fruit trees. Revive flower beds.

Make everything lovely again.

I lined the driveway with flowers because I wanted it to feel like a portal to a more beautiful world.

I worked and worked at it.

Until this last year, that is.

Which has been hard, to say the least.

In fact, the proper description for my 2023 might be: bottom of the well.

Long story short: I couldn’t get up, much less divide perennials.

So the beds are overgrown and weedy. Things are messier than I’d prefer.

But I sit here, at the cusp of the new year, and I realize something important.

My past self would have seen everything that was undone.
It would have been a personal failing.
A voice from an unkind system.
A chorus of “should haves.”

But this year, I can see it all with more kindness.

When I zoom out and put on a wider lens— when I look at life through the seasons— I can see it all with more generosity.

Nothing in nature is perfectly consistent:

There are years with too much rain when the red roses get mottled with mildew.
Years when the leaves of the trees curl and fall from lack of water.
And years where it grows lush and thrives.

This is the way it goes.

I think of my old professor. For most of her life, the hydrangeas in front of her house were immaculate.

But her memory started to fail and then, it was another season.

“She’s really letting the place go,” her neighbors whispered.

She doesn’t remember how to crack an egg, for Pete’s sake.

What a cruel barometer our society has given us.

It asks us to be perfectly consistent at all times.

To be in full bloom constantly.

It’s unrealistic, unfair, and sets us up to fail. Repeatedly. For a lifetime.

It keeps us drowning in “shoulds” while our vibrant life slides by, day after day.

A phrase I think about all the time is Don Miguel Ruiz— Your best is changing all the time.

Your best depends on your health, your mind, the circumstances of your life.
It depends on the seasons.

Sometimes your best is a sparkling clean house.
Sometimes your best is taking a nap while dishes pile up in the sink.

Sometimes your best is tended flower beds.
Sometimes your best is resting while weeds grow.

Sometimes your best is homemade soup.
Sometimes it’s carry-out burgers.

Sometimes it is being patient and kind.
Sometimes it’s thorny.

Both can be your best in that moment.

And the thing is— the sun goes up and down. The seasons spiral on. We are a part of nature.

The best we can do gets to be enough.

Because we are worthy either way.

We get to see ourselves with grace and reverence. To be forgiving. To know that there are seasons. That nothing is final. That things bounce back. They were made to.

There’s a Louise Gluck poem that says:

“And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—”

I think of that often.

Nature just cycles on.

And we are whole…despite what is done (or undone).

All we can do is do our best and keep on going.

Knowing that our best looks different every. single. day.




Love,

Rhonda