Planting Seeds

On this lovely Saturday morning, I rolled out of bed at 8:30 in the morning. Well actually, it was more of a "hey, let's ignore the alarm clock for thirty minutes and wait until my parents come pounding on the door before I jump out of bed" kind of thing. Of course, when they opened the door to check that I was actually awake, I feigned this bright-and-early face to please them, then dropped back on my pillow the second the door shut.

This is nothing new; it happens every week. There was this stretch of time during the summer when I tried to wake up at 6:30 every morning to go for a run, but sadly, this little experiment lasted for a grand total of one day. Well, I was proud of myself that day.

But today was one of the few Saturday mornings that I was out of bed by nine and out the door by 9:15. (The only time this has happened was when I was so anxious to get started on SAT studying that I literally could not close my eyes without seeing SAT-witches cackling in my face and mocking at me for my terrible scores... didn't get much sleep that night). But today was Hands On Northview- planting trees and bushes and pinestraw and things like that to make the school all nice and pretty. "Pretty" wasn't exactly where I saw the great outdoors going though, when I saw the disgusting bales of pinestraw they gave us... this isn't your everyday prickly pinestraw, please understand this. It was wet and mushy, and every time I tried to pick a bale up it'd simply plop to the ground and splatter little bits of mud and dirt across the sidewalk. Pinestraw isn't even supposed to splatter. Not to mention that it was black, not brown...

It was a pleasure. So I moved on to pulling weeds; I ended up pulling out all the grass and leaving the weeds in the soil to grow. This is when I realized that I'm terrible at yard work. Hey, nature is fine and dandy and all, but when it comes to me trying to control it? I think I'll leave that to the male in the house (since males are always control freaks anyways and want everything to go their way, with that i'm-the-dominant-one-here attitude. Don't deny it.) I didn't even try to plant a tree (well, the "trees" were more like bushes). I'm sensing budget cuts on the plants this year...

Putting all this aside though, it was actually pretty cool doing something for nature today. I put pinestraw next to those bushes so that they'd look good and be all safe and snug, you know? Now the next step is to plant a tree somewhere and watch it grow. Gosh, how rewarding that would be, and how I could move on to bigger and better things after that experience...

I'm being serious though. I've never seen a tree grow (since it's an awfully slow process), but there's always that one day when you nonchalantly glance over at the tree and then BAM, you realize that it's a tree now and not the skinnly little twig you had planted a year ago. And this realization hits, and you think, "Gee- I didn't even realize how fast that thing grew!" But this whole process happens with humans too. Today, while I was pulling at the weeds with a friend I've known since middle school, I glanced over at him and I noticed he was laughing the way he always does, with his eyes crinkled up and his head thrown back. But for some reason, I was caught off guard. He was different from the sixth-grader I had befriended. His smile was more mature, his laugh more refined, his body more built than the one of the little lanky kid I knew before. Of course, I never noticed him changing, but today, when I saw him working under the brilliantly blue sky, I just realized how much we had grown, and how beautiful we had grown. And I smiled.

Yes, yard work is most definitely rewarding.