ONE MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER [W, 8-20-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—ONE MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER [W, 8-20-25]

 

Our HOA sent us a letter: “Get rid of those weeds in the pea gravel flower beds around your house or else!” They also posted a notice on our garage door, so that all our neighbors would know what miscreants we are and could put pressure on us to pull our weeds.

We are old and decrepit. We know that Helen can’t pull weeds, because the last time she did it messed up her knee so badly that she had to have a cortisone shot, and it still hurts. And when I lean over, there is a good chance I’ll just keep going until my face is in the pea gravel with the weeds. So we contacted an HOA-approved lawn service to pull the weeds, for an adequate fee, of course. That was three months ago.

So, to avoid being put out on the street, even with the face-plant fear, I have started pulling the weeds myself. One at a time. Each time I pass by the pea gravel beds, as I go to the mail box, or out to walk.

It’s not really a problem, because I’m an incrementalist.

I put the laundry away one item at a time. Whenever I am in the bedroom, I take one item from the basket and put it in a drawer. Back when I could climb a ladder, I put the ladder up under the gutter and cleaned out what I could reach. Then I put the ladder away and got it out again another day, to put it where I could clean a different part of the gutter. I read many books on any given day, often only one page per book. I do the same thing with washing dishes. I don’t read the whole Bible in one day; why should dirty dishes be more important than the Bible?

I was most famous for incremental lawn mowing, since lawns are publicly visible. Chemotherapy made me sun sensitive, and being a fair-skinned farm boy who grew up shirtless before sun block, I’m prone to skin cancer anyway. So I mowed only in the shade. The shade has various shapes at different times of day. So my yard usually had grass of 5 or 6 different lengths and forms, according to where the sun was the last time I mowed. A neighbor, knowing my profession, once asked one of our daughters if there were a religious significance to the triangles and trapezoids of differently heighted grass in our yard. She said yes, apparently figuring it wasn’t as embarrassing if there were a religious reason.

Other people in my family are not incrementalists. They are projectists-they do the whole project at once, be it mowing the lawn or washing the dishes or pulling weeds. They finish what they start…right then and there.

They are sometimes dismayed by my incremental approach. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to clean the whole length of the gutter once the ladder is out? Yes, but efficiency is not the only virtue.

Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better to be a project person, and maybe it would. But I think I’ll just continue to be an incrementalist. It fits me.

Life is made up of moments, one bite of pumpkin pie, one game of trotty horse, one kiss, one prayer, one walk down the aisle. One final farewell…

John Robert McFarland