Cheating

The time is right for starting seeds, drawing up garden plot plans, and making tree orders. Like any obsessed gardener, I lay awake at night imaging the beauty that will bloom in the spring and lavish us with fruitful production through the summer.

Except I feel like I am cheating a lover.

I am not planning for my garden, the one I can view out the back window from my house in Clintonville. I have barely any seeds started for the earth I worked and richened for the last three years.

No, I am mentally arranging a would-be garden, one that would cover vast swaths of the four acres around a house we looked at this autumn, a house still on the market.

I am imagining a pumpkin patch, a bigger chicken coop alongside bee hives in an orchard, community garden plots, and a sugarbush. Alex is considering meat goats and rabbits. Lil wants a cat. We are having a family affair with another home.

Last fall when we saw the house, twice, we decided to stay where we are through the holidays and reconsider in spring. It is now almost spring and we still see more opportunity than risk in this ‘other house’.

The list is posted on the fridge of all the small things we need to update on our current home. Super De-Clutter Woman is attacking all areas of the house. By the time the grass is green again we will be ready to list and buy and sell.

There are so many things that need to fall in place that our dream of a bigger homestead remains a crap shoot. What if there is a negotiating impasse? What if the potential house has structural issues we didn’t see on the first visits? What if we move in June or July, too late to plant at the new place but too early to harvest at the old?

I don’t care much about the what ifs. I am willing to put in the tiring work to stage and pack, tolerate last-minute showings, and risk having no garden at all this year. I am madly in love.