On yard work, old age, and a minor league flashback
We have been power-washing a house in rural Pennsylvania. This is not a sentence I expected to be writing at this stage of my life. It took two days. Somewhere in there, scrubbing at a constellation of tiny black dots that would not come off the siding no matter what we sprayed at them, we learned about something called artillery fungus — a fungus that – and I want to be precise here – shoots its spores up to twenty feet at light-colored surfaces. Our house, apparently, is an oversized target. Ed pointed out that my hair, which is now white enough to qualify, is probably a secondary one. We sat on the patio and laughed about this for longer than the joke deserved, mostly because we were too tired to do anything else.
Then there is the mulch. Mulch, we now know, where the artillery fungus lives, busily manufacturing its spore ammo. We have spent hours — many hours, over many days — on our hands and knees in the mulch, pulling weeds by the hundreds, possibly the thousands. We weren’t counting, because counting would have required a desire to know the measure of our torture. My wrists ache. My fingers ache. My knees have opinions. My back has filed a formal complaint. I am aware that a woman on her hands and knees in the mulch, wincing, is not a tragic figure, and I don’t mean to make it sound like one — it’s more that I keep thinking, somewhere around weed four hundred, we have done this before. We did this for years, in various yards, with careers to manage and a family to raise, instead of a fungus problem. I remember thinking even then that this might be a never-ending task.
We have never lived anywhere — rented or owned, for six months, or twenty years — without deciding, almost immediately, that it needed something. Paint. New windows. A garden where there was no garden. The house didn’t need it. We did. I don’t know how else to explain it.
The truth is nobody asked us to do any of this. There is no landlord threatening us, no inspection looming, no urgent deadline forcing a two-day power-washing marathon or a war against several thousand weeds. We did this to ourselves, the way we always do, because some old switch got flipped the moment we walked back in the door — the same switch, I suspect, that got flipped in every house we’ve ever lived in. Take the garage. We went in planning to buy a small chest freezer, so we’d have room to stock up on local, seasonal food. Somewhere along the way we also decided the garage needed an entirely new shelving system — five hundred dollars’ worth — which had nothing to do with the freezer and everything to do with the fact that once we’re in a room with a project in mind, we apparently cannot leave without finding a second one. Nobody asked us to reorganize the garage. We just went in for a freezer.
What makes this round different is that we are not thirty-four anymore. At thirty-four, a weekend of yard work was a weekend of yard work. At our age, it is a weekend of yard work followed by days of moving like a couple who just lost a fight with a much larger opponent. We ice things now. We get up from a chair a bit more slowly. I feel like I’m coaching myself through a minor athletic event every time I stand up from the garden bed. Neither of us has said “we’re getting old” out loud yet, but the mulch knows.
After a couple of weeks of this, we took the grandkids to a minor league baseball game in Erie for a day off. We watched grown men we’ve never met play a game for which we have no stake in the outcome, and I had a full-body flashback. Not a metaphorical one. My hand actually twitched toward an imaginary scorebook in my lap. For about fifteen years, I kept score at every game our three sons played while Ed coached, or ran the league, or both. We did this for so long and so completely that I am apparently still wired for it, a few decades and three thousand miles later.
I like baseball. I want to be clear about that, because what I’m about to say could be mistaken for not liking it. I have sat through hundreds of games, thousands of innings, in heat and rain and the particular cold of an April doubleheader, and most of it I remember fondly. But sitting there, eating a fifteen-dollar Philly cheesesteak, watching a stranger strike out, I noticed something I wasn’t quite expecting: I’m not sure I want to be doing this for the rest of my life. Some people do — happily, for decades, generation after generation, grandkids replacing kids in the same bleachers. I get it. It’s just that somewhere in the last several years I became a person who wants something else, and I don’t entirely know when that happened, or what to do with knowing it.
The artillery fungus, for what it’s worth, does not care about any of this. It will keep living in that mulch and firing its ridiculous spores at the siding whether we are here to scrub them off or not, whether we ever weed that bed again, whether we’re standing on this patio in a year or are in another country entirely. It has been doing this for years, probably, long before we ever noticed it, and it will keep doing it no matter what we decide. The house was fine before we scoured it within an inch of its life. It will be fine after. We are the only ones who thought it needed us quite this badly. It’s a good habit to have loved. I’m just no longer sure it’s one I want to keep.
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