Lifestyles of the loose and random

When did everything get this out of control?
Why does it bother me?
What am I going to do about it?

The long Fourth of July weekend provokes a bunch of conflicting reactions to life's persistent questions. One of those is the feeling that I'm struggling to stay afloat, treading water with no real prospect of actually swimming across the great water - or even getting to the edge of the pond - in which I'm such a little fish. The domestic economy and ecology of Om Shanty, our little niche in the larger world, is not the orderly place I would like it to be, and it irritates me.

The garden, as usual, is a great symbol of life and it's place in the universe. The warmer weather, coupled with abundant rain in central swingstate, has made everything grow faster. So while I celebrate the hosta and daylilies blooming, the tomatoes and beans vining upward, and the eggplants and peppers bearing fruit, I can't keep up with the weeds, which I define as any plant I don't want to be where it is.

I'm not god, just the referee in this game/match/microcosm. If I say the creeping charlie is out of bounds, that means it's out of bounds. It's a rule-bound game where I make, interpret, and apply the rules. The appeal process, which is out of my jurisdiction, involves natural selection, and there I'm just another player. I guess the long weekend gave me additional time to try to keep up, without making any discernible progress in the battle to bring order out of chaos.

Both of the major projects I had contemplated for this weekend - raising the level of the patio approaching the back door and erecting a bonafide wood shed - never got off the ground. I made a decision early-on to chip away at some other tasks instead of concentrating on starting and completing one big thing. The ongoing garden is one continuing diversion, of course, always worth some puttering and never finished, but I've found an even better way of killing major blocks of time: reorganizing and purging files.

I've kept some old files in boxes since our last move, and it's high time they found their way into a drawer where I can forget about them again. Our garage/workshop has been slowly evolving into an office/workshop with places for tools, shelves for books (soon to be liberated from their own boxes), and space for files that have been stuck away in folders and forgotten at the end of a job, degree program, conference, committee term, school year, workshop, fiscal year, or other life event.

There are tattered manila folders from classes at three different undergraduate and one graduate institution, several jobs at several schools, publishers, bakeries, and one-man landscaping outfits. There are papers I wrote, notes I scrawled, articles I photocopied for some unknown later use. There is correspondence from family, friends, and colleagues, newspaper and magazine clippings on art, sports, literature, language - the usual suspects - and children's artwork, report cards, fee statements, schedules, and other artifacts from three grade schools, two middle schools, two high schools, and two colleges. There are folders full of letters applying for jobs and others informing applicant that the position has been filled.

Weeding through the reams of paper is a trip down memory lane and a powerful reminder of where I've been individually and where we've been as a family. The thing that hit me in the face as I separated the wheat from the chaff, saving 30 percent of it and recycling 70 percent, is that I still care about most of what I collected and put out in those earlier stages of the game. I still believe the things I wrote in papers, articles, and essays in the later stages of undergrad education. Even my writing style hasn't changed fundamentally - whether that's a good thing or not - even though the narrative voice has dropped down an octave in the course of the narrative.

Maybe the continuity of my written self from 30 years ago shouldn't surprise me, and it's reassuring in a way that I'm the same person I was. I didn't completely lose my way or turn away from what I was trying to do. Just as surprisingly, it wasn't depressing to look back at the documentary evidence of the many projects that didn't turn out as I thought they would. Nor did it make me all nostalgic for those times and places, when things were wonderful and I supposedly had my whole future in front of me.

It did, however, make my back hurt to sit in the office/workshop for hours at a time, so I took breaks to go outside and pull weeds. So the contest continues: which will run out first, the papers to be sorted and filed away or the plants to be pulled and transplanted? It's all foliage, and there's more where that came from.