The Days When the World Doesn't Glow

August 22,

The fall garden has still not been planted.

I bought the seeds weeks ago.

They are sitting in their packets—rainbow carrots, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, chamomile, dill, coneflower, cosmos. The soil is ready. There is a vegetable bed waiting for vegetables and a flower bed waiting for flowers. I even brought home a collection of old plastic pots from work because I thought surely I could find something to grow in them.

I intended to plant everything on August 4.

Then August 4 became August 19.

And now it is August 22.

This is my first year gardening, and I am learning that one of the things I failed to grow was a plan.

I planted things because I loved them. I tucked plants into places that seemed right. I watched the sun move across the yard and learned which corners baked in the afternoon. I learned that some things thrive and some things wilt and some things surprise you entirely.

The sunflowers surprised me most.

I watched them grow from tiny seedlings into plants more than ten feet tall. For weeks, it seemed as though every time I looked at them they had climbed a little higher. Eventually they towered over the fence, enormous and almost ridiculous, their faces held high toward the sky.

I was so happy every time I saw them.

I think somewhere along the way I had imagined they would stay like that for a while.

They didn't.

After months of watching them grow taller and waiting for those enormous flowers to finally open, they stood upright in all their glory for maybe a week or two.

Then their heads began to bow.

I knew, of course, that sunflowers eventually drooped. I just hadn't understood how quickly that part would come. I thought I would have more time with them looking toward the sky.

There was something almost unfair about it. They spent so much of the summer becoming, and the version of them I had been waiting for was remarkably brief.

And yet, once they bowed, they weren't finished.

That has been another lesson.

I thought a sunflower would bloom, dry, and then I would harvest the seeds. Instead, there is this long in-between. The petals disappear. The leaves become brittle. The enormous heads hang heavily toward the earth while the seeds continue to mature.

I find myself checking them constantly, asking, Are you ready yet?

They aren't.

It is strange how quickly the beautiful part seemed to pass and how slowly everything afterward seems to move.

Around them, I can see the rest of the summer garden beginning to do the same.

Leaves that were lush a month ago are starting to wilt. Plants are becoming tired around the edges. The garden that seemed to be rushing toward abundance in June and July has begun its slow retreat.

I suppose I imagined seasons as cleaner things.

Summer blooms. Fall arrives. You harvest one garden and plant the next.

Instead, everything overlaps.

The sunflowers are still finishing while the summer garden is fading, and the fall garden hasn't even begun.

Maybe that is partly why I feel behind.

I am looking at one season ending before I feel ready for the next one.

It feels strangely similar to everything else right now.

The house is getting cluttered.

The car is in the shop.

Work is busy in that peculiar way fall becomes busy, even for two people without children or school schedules of our own. There are projects everywhere I look. Things to repair. Things to clean. Things I want to build. Things I meant to finish weeks ago.

There is always something waiting.

And sometimes, when time finally appears, I don't know what to do with it.

I look around at everything that needs my attention and somehow become incapable of giving my attention to any of it.

It is an uncomfortable feeling—to have wanted this life so much and occasionally feel overwhelmed by the maintenance of it.

A home asks to be cared for.

A garden asks to be tended.

A career asks for energy.

Relationships ask for presence.

Dreams, inconveniently, also require something from us.

Even the beautiful things need tending.

I think that is something I am only beginning to understand.

Marriage, it turns out, needs tending too.

We are still new at this. Still learning what it means to take two lives that already had their own rhythms and make a shared one without losing the people we were before it.

I notice it most when I look at the calendar.

Saturday is a workday for us, which leaves Sunday.

One day.

And somehow that one little square on the calendar is supposed to hold an entire life.

There is the house that needs cleaning and maintaining. The garden that needs watering, planting, harvesting, and occasionally simply enjoying. There are errands and projects and all the small things that accumulated while we were working.

There is our relationship, which deserves time that isn't simply the two of us collapsing together at the end of another long day.

And there is me.

I need some time when nobody needs anything from me. Time to be outside. To read. To write. To tend the garden. To wander around the house rearranging something simply because I feel like it. Sometimes I need to accomplish something. Sometimes I need to do absolutely nothing.

But Sundays don't exist in isolation.

There are birthday parties we don't want to miss because they celebrate people we love.

There are lunches with family.

There are friends we genuinely want to see.

There are invitations we are happy to receive and people whose lives we want to remain part of.

These aren't things I want to remove from our life.

They are our life.

And maybe that's part of what makes this season so difficult to navigate.

So many of the things competing for my time are good things.

I don't want less family.

I don't want fewer friends.

I don't want less time with my husband.

I don't want to stop caring for our home.

I don't want to give up the garden.

And I don't want to lose myself somewhere in the maintenance of all of it.

There simply doesn't seem to be enough Sunday.

We are also learning that when we finally do have time at home together, we don't always agree about what that time most needs.

There are Sundays when I look around and see the garden that needs tending or the room that desperately needs to be put back together, while he sees something entirely different that deserves our attention.

Neither of us is necessarily wrong.

We are just two people standing inside the same life, seeing different things.

That has become part of this new marriage too: learning what makes the other person feel settled. Learning which unfinished things bother me but don't bother him, and which things matter deeply to him that I might never have considered urgent.

More importantly, we are learning what brightens each other's world.

He is learning the things that make me feel more like myself.

I am learning his.

And we are both trying to make room for those things—not because we always understand why they matter so much to the other person, but because we understand that they do.

There is something very loving about that.

But there is another balance I don't want us to lose.

I want us to make time for each other without slowly giving away all the time we once gave ourselves.

I still want afternoons lost in the garden.

I want him to have the things that belong entirely to him.

I want projects we build together and interests that remain entirely our own. I want dinners at the same table and stories to bring back to that table because we occasionally spent the afternoon apart.

Perhaps a shared life isn't supposed to consume two individual ones.

Perhaps it is supposed to make room for both.

But making room requires time, and lately time feels like the thing we have the least of.

So we are figuring it out in ordinary ways.

Which Sunday gets the house.

Which Sunday gets the family.

Which Sunday gets the project.

Which Sunday gets us.

And somewhere in there, which little piece of Sunday belongs only to ourselves.

Some weeks we get the balance right.

Some weeks we don't.

Maybe that is part of being new at this too.

I think what I'm beginning to understand is that the problem isn't that my life is filled with things I don't want.

Quite the opposite.

My life is filled with people I love, work that requires me, a home I wanted, a marriage I cherish, a garden I chose to grow, friendships I want to keep, family I want to know, and ideas I still want to pursue.

It is a beautiful problem to have.

But beautiful things can still be heavy when you try to carry all of them at once.

And perhaps that is why, lately, even when I can still see the beauty everywhere around me, it doesn't always glow.

There are days when I walk outside and the light catches something just right and the whole world seems illuminated. A sunflower towers over the fence. A bee disappears inside a flower. The evening light falls across the house we are learning to make our own.

On those days, noticing feels effortless.

And then there are days like these.

The world is still beautiful.

I know that.

I can see it.

But it isn't glowing.

The sunflowers are still magnificent, even bowed and drying at the end of summer. Maybe especially then. There is something beautiful about seeing the whole life of a thing instead of only the moment when it blooms.

The garden is still alive. The earth still smells like earth when I water it. The evening still cools eventually. Birds still find their way into the yard.

I notice these things.

I'm grateful for them.

They just don't reach quite as deeply some days.

Maybe there is a difference between failing to appreciate a life and simply being tired inside of it.

I don't want to turn every difficult season into a lesson. I don't think every feeling needs to be corrected before we are allowed to continue living.

Maybe sometimes we simply acknowledge:

This is a lot right now.

And then we go outside anyway.

Not to accomplish anything.

Not to pull every weed or finally plant every seed or turn the yard into the garden we imagined.

Just to look.

There are eight packets of seeds waiting for me.

For a while, I thought their waiting meant I was behind.

Some days, I still think it does.

But maybe this, too, is part of learning to garden.

I am learning seasons.

I am learning soil.

I am learning plants.

I am learning that a sunflower can spend months reaching for the sky, bloom gloriously, bow almost immediately, and then spend weeks quietly becoming something else.

There is far more waiting in gardening than I expected.

But perhaps I am also learning myself.

How much I can hold at once.

When enthusiasm becomes expectation.

When a project that once sounded joyful starts feeling like another obligation.

When I need a plan, and when I simply need to put one seed into the earth.

I still want the fall garden.

That matters.

Maybe I don't need an entire free Sunday or a perfectly drawn planting map. Maybe one evening I will walk outside with the spinach seeds and plant one row.

And perhaps another day I will plant the carrots.

The flowers can wait their turn.

The garden does not know about my unfinished projects.

It does not know the car is in the shop.

It does not know what happened at work or what needs cleaning inside the house.

It does not know about birthday parties, family lunches, full calendars, or whose turn it is to choose what matters most this Sunday.

It only knows what is planted and what isn't.

There is something merciful about that.

So tonight, on August 22, the fall garden remains mostly an idea.

The summer garden is fading.

The sunflowers are bowed over, taking their sweet time turning flowers into seeds.

The house isn't as tidy as I would like.

There are projects waiting for another Sunday.

There are people we love and want to make time for.

We are still learning how to build a life together while leaving enough room inside it for each of us to remain ourselves.

The soil is ready.

The next season is sitting inside eight little paper packets.

And I am here, somewhere between exhaustion and hope, still looking closely enough at the world to notice that even when it does not glow, it is beautiful.

Maybe that is enough for today.

There will be brighter days.

There will also be ordinary ones.

And somewhere between them, slowly and imperfectly, the wild things will grow.