Playing in Dirt

Last Friday afternoon, as I went to pick up my son from school, I smiled at the thought of a lazy weekend ahead of me. It was a long weekend but we chose not to make any plans. My husband wanted to do some woodworking, my younger wanted to play his new video game and my older wanted to have nothing to do with us, so I was basically left to my own devices. I didn’t mind. I could catch up on sleep and maybe do some writing and baking. I had all the ingredients for baklava, so why not to make an early Father’s Day treat for my husband.

I baked the baklava all right, but none of the other items from my short list happened. Saturday morning my husband decided to turn our idle weekend into a labor camp. We were going to pave a pathway in our backyard.

“I thought it was supposed to be woodworking not landscaping,” I said confused. "What about the pergola?" Making the pergola was the self-inflicted pain, I mean, the project my husband had ambitiously taken upon his shoulders last year, and which he planned to resume this weekend.

“I'm prepping for the pergola,” my husband said. “But since I am going to be working in the backyard, I want to clean it first and make it look nice.

My first reaction was to sum it up as procrastination. But then I remembered all the times when I couldn’t focus on my tasks until I tidied my room. The environment is important after all. Still, even though I didn’t mind cleaning the yard up, I saw no point in the whole beautifying and paving project. I thought our yard was supposed to remain "natural". Our dog wasn't complaining, right? Neither was I looking forward to pulling the weeds. It was scorching hot, the air was thick with pollen, and I did enough meaningless work with no lasting results- with all the cleaning, cooking and laundry, yard work is where I drew the line.

“Come on,” my husband said reaching for a piece of baklava instead of breakfast.“ We will make a family project out of it.”

And that’s how he got me. I was a sucker for family projects.

And so, Saturday morning, we made a family trip to the landfill and collected landscaping rocks before heading to Home Depot to pick up piles of tiles and bags of pebbles and sand. It was something different. Next it was time to remove the grass. There was lots of digging and moving the dirt around. Oddly, there was something relaxing in this hard, manual work. Even the pointless weeding was quite therapeutic.

“You know, apparently there are bacteria in the soil that trigger the release of serotonin, which makes the dirt a natural anti-depressant,” I shared with my husband what I had read a while back in “The Nature Principle” by Richard Louv. "Don't you think the dirt smells quite nice actually?"

Maybe this yard project was not such a bad idea, after all. Slowly but surely, I was getting at peace with sweating my weekend away. Until I realized that the simple, amateurish pathway I had in mind, did not align with my husband’s complex and professional vision.

“Shouldn’t we hire a service?” I suggested. We hired people to paint our house, why can't we hire a landscaper? They will have tools, ideas, and experience to finish it in no time.

But my lack of confidence in our skills didn’t affect my husband’s drive to complete the work without any external help. He watched a few YouTube videos, bought more tools and materials, and we continued the work as planned.

By the end of the weekend, the first half of the pavement was complete.

To my own surprise, the project was a perfect DIY. I guess the key was to believe that we could do it. I didn't. If if was up to me, we would have never attempted it. I thought it was beyond us. But my husband believed he could do it, knew he wanted to do it, and assumed he would learn while doing it. As a result, not only do we have a paved pathway, but we also know how to make one.

As we were sitting on the patio Monday night comparing the soreness of our muscles and admiring the existing half of our paved pathway, we all agreed it was a fun family weekend. Perhaps the happy chemicals in the dirt were already doing the good work.