Your Daily Miracle: Unbidden Orange Poppies. (They are taking over my garden! Hurrah!)

I flummox my neighbor, the one across the street who dug up his lawn, reseeded, and waters religiously.  I confuse him--that neighbor, you know the one because every street has at least one--because I have still not found or bought a hose attachment and so water with my thumb pressed over the hose at ineffective angles.  I worry him with my reel mower and my lack of weed-whacking and my comfort with a few weeds here and there.  The seeds are barely up and the garden looks ragged, and he in his broad hat, he who would probably vacuum his driveway if he thought it was needed, he is counting the days to when they move south and he can stop staring at me bungling about in the front yard.  I know he watches me through his front curtains.  I can feel him watching me.

It is a relationship based on paranoia.  He thinks I am a rather empty-headed female out of my depth with too much garden and too much lawn; I am overly conscious of his (mostly) silent criticism.

It didn't help matters when we dug up a third of our lawn.  He asked Martin, "Have you ever owned a house before?"  Martin replied in the affirmative.  He said, "It's a lot of work once you start digging things up, you know."

Oh, if only he could have seen Wazoo Farm, that wild 3/4 of an acre we left behind in Pennsylvania that, at intervals, we designed and let grow wild and tended and fussed over.  He would have just hated it, I expect, especially the tilting towers of raw material that Martin built in the driveway, awaiting projects we never quite got to. . . .

My brain and my soul feel as if they are that driveway, stacked high with raw materials.  In my imagination they have already become books and essays, organization systems and home improvements and successful personal developments.  If only I did not have to apply myself to the great work that lies between my vision and the fulfillment of those projects!

A few projects in particular dog my footsteps right now.  One is an essay that I am not sure if I am ready to write yet; one is the completion and development of a book I started and fell in love with; another is a book out with agents; another is a text out with editors; still another is a finished novel that needs rewrites.

Some people, like my neighbor across the street, live life in a linear way:  he targets a project, buys the supplies, lays them out, prepares the site, and goes at it.  Night and day he will not rest until the project is done.

I collect the raw materials and dump them in a corner, begin to tinker, become distracted by another project for which I collect more supplies, then something else catches my eye and I run after that; then someone arrives for dinner and someone else needs a lunch made and then still someone else needs all my attention, every single bit, and the projects gather cobwebs while I tend to it.

And the neighbor watches me through the curtains from across the street and shakes his head slowly.  "That girl," he says to his wife, "Is the most scattered young woman I have ever seen."

Yet, occasionally, out of chaos, something beautiful happens: a delphinium blooms on the corner, tall velvety spires rising out of a green crown!  Or a seed turns to tiny shoot, then to leaves, and a sunflower is born; or an orange poppy blooms, unbidden and unplanted but welcomed with great joy.