Over this last weekend, after we have moved the last of the stuff out of our apartment, after we’d said goodbye to our apartment complex, after we’d driven 2 hours with the mattresses strapped to the top of the car, after we’d moved everything into our apartment, I walked our new property.

It’s a tradition, you see.  Many evenings in the spring, summer and fall, after my father came home from work, my parents would walk the garden, talking about what they planned to do, what my mother had worked on over the day, or just observing what had bloomed and grown.  I’ve inherited (or have been taught) a love of gardening.

Gardening, to me, is a lot like knitting or crochet.  There’s an initial rush for both – for stitching it can be buying the yarn, picking out the project, casting on those first stitches.  The potential streams in front of you, waiting to be fulfilled.  Gardening is similar – the planning, the dreaming, the buying of plants and thinking of what’s to come.

Stitching and gardening also have that initial sense of great progress, as the stitches stack up on one another, or as the sprouts shoot out of the ground.  But then, in the middle, there’s the long haul – where nothing much seems to be happening, even as you know that you’ve been knitting forever or as you water each day.

After slogging through for who knows how long, the end, all of a sudden, is in sight.  Fruit or flowers start appearing on plants.  The bindoff draws near.  Suddenly, all the progress and effort becomes worth it.

There’s probably a reason I have hobbies that have a long payoff, and I’m not quite sure what it is.