I’m so full of shit.

I grew zinnias once. One summer, five years ago. It was a fluke. Magic seeds. I don’t know. But, the way I talk about plants and gardening, you’d think my backyard looked like this every year. It doesn’t.

You want to know what it really looks like?

This.

This is what I see out my bedroom window, when I’m sitting at my writing desk, bullshitting you with blog posts about my love of things with roots.

I aspire, I envision, I plan, I even yearn . . . but, for the past few years, that’s all I’ve done. Well, that and mowing, although last year even mowing didn’t happen all that often.

The boys and I kept the front yard mowed (I mean, we aren’t animals), but eventually we let nature have her way with the backyard. At the peak of summer, when the taller weeds masked some of the biggest piles of crap, it was actually kind of cool to sit back and watch the transformation. Bunnies set up house beneath the wood piles. Bees and butterflies found something to snack on daily and I began to question who decides what’s a weed and what’s a plant? I’ll admit, the snakes and salamanders got a bit cocky, but I swallowed hard and managed to look the other way. I told myself I was part of the “grow more, mow less” movement and I wasn’t giving up, but giving back.

I’m so full of shit.

I wish I could blame the condition of my backyard on my ex-husband. This was his domain, after all. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’d never used the lawn mower until last year. But, every pile of crap is just remnants of some improvement he tried to make.

The old wood in one corner of the yard is from the deck he tore down, then rebuilt, newer, stronger, and with a tree house above it. The shingles and splintered wood along the fence-line are from the storage shed that belonged to the previous homeowners and was already rotting when we bought the place. He tore it down to make room for my Little Red Barn. We had as many successful Pinterest projects as failures, all of which have seen too many summers and just need to go. Limbs from countless storms. Last year’s Christmas tree. We’ve lived here 17 years now and every one of them can be seen in some part of our backyard.

So, even as I was writing about my plans for a cutting garden, last week, I was asking myself, what makes me think this year will be any different than the others when I yearned for a small, pleasant pasture, where my dogs could poop and I could rest, and my spirit could be renewed?

The truth is, maybe this year won’t be different. But I am different. I’m still working out what that means in other aspects of my life. For my landscape, it means I rented a 10-yard dumpster and filled that fella. To. The. Brim.

In biblical times, letting my yard run wild might have been called “proclaiming jubilee” – the concept of letting things and people return to their origins; slaves were freed, land was left to rest for a season, debts were forgiven, and time was for renewal and rest.

It’s funny how there’s no place in the Bible where anyone explains the amount of work that must be done the year after jubilee. I guess that’s not the point. Some change can only happen by letting things go so completely that you have to start over. For me, that meant things had to be beyond repair, beyond upcycling, beyond hope. Now the real work can begin.