Think for a moment about your childhood, about the chore that you hated more than all others.  The task so despised that your dislike for it continued into adulthood.  For me, that chore is gardening.

My Mother is a Master Gardener.  Even in the picky climate of the Rocky Mountains, her flower beds are awash in colorful displays of peonies, allium, and iris.  Her handmade raised beds are filled with cucumber, squashes, peppers and onions — a salad bar for the elk and deer.  And she dutifully plants, waters, and prunes her gardens until they’re the envy of the neighborhood.

As a child, she would often force me to help her in the yard.  Perhaps she thought it would be a bonding experience.  More likely she needed the labor, and if I wasn’t smart enough to make myself scarce, then I was available to help.

The majority of our gardening disagreements centered around appropriate attire for yard work.  She in her washable shorts and polo; me in whatever I wanted to wear that day divorced completely from appropriateness to the task.  Nearly every morning, I was sent back into the house to change clothes because “that is not what we wear to work in the yard.”

Whatever my Mother finds fulfilling and life-affirming about gardening, I have never known it.  Hand me a scrub brush and gloves and I’ll clean every dirty toilet, squalid sink, and filthy floor in the place, but hand me a gardening spade and I might throw it at you.

That’s why Kyle is assigned all yard work and gardening chores in perpetuity.  At least, he was.

Last week, a summer heat wave turned our yard into a lush, overgrown jungle.  Our lawn was going to seed.  Gnats and bugs abounded in the deep foliage.  And with Kyle’s work schedule busier than usual, it became obvious that I was going to need to mow the lawn or we would soon need machetes to reach the garage.

Instead of changing into a pair of grubby shorts and a tank top, I decided that now that I am a home-owning adult, I’m going to garden in whatever the hell I want.  So I put on my favorite floral sundress and pinned my hair into a cute updo.

Overkill?  Perhaps.  But we live on a busy street, and I’ll be damned if my first public appearance since the start of COVID was going to involve athleisure.

Dressed in my cocktail-hour finery, I mowed our third-of-an-acre into perfectly manicured rows, expertly trimmed the flower bed edging, and pruned back the bushes.  Because if you’re going to be forced to do yard work, you might as well do it right.

Kyle, stunned both by my spontaneous embrace of yard work and my attire, sent a video of me to my parents.  And my Mother was finally forced to admit that yes, you can do yard work in your nice clothes.

Cultural appropriation is an oft-mentioned by poorly understood concept.  The Remix discusses how a handful of Black visionaries turned the hip-hop style of NYC into a fashion phenomenon without getting any of the credit.  From Dapper Dan to Misa Hylton, the documentary chronicles how the luxury brands went from shunning street fashion to profiting from it.  It’s an excellent watch if you grew up on early-90s hip-hop.

My hair is so dry right now.  My daily walks may be keeping me sane, but the ensuing sun exposure is killing my locks.  I needed a moisturizing hair regimen that is going to smooth out my dried up ends and soften the brassy tones.  These are the products that I’ve been using.

Briogeo Be Gentle, Be Kind Mask

Aussie Hair Insurance Leave-In Conditioner

Redken Brownlights Conditioner for Brassiness in Brown Hair

We don’t eat a lot of pasta in our house, but Half Baked Harvest’s 20-Minute Lemon Butter Pasta with Ricotta and Spicy Breadcrumbs caught my eye.  I added more squash, zucchini, and grilled some mushrooms and tomatoes to go with it as well.  We also added some Italian sausage.  It was a fresh, light take on pasta that was good for a quick summer dinner.

But I would only make half of the recipe next time because we didn’t finish the leftovers.  Pasta two days in a row is a little too much in August.

With a sudden abundance of time on my hands, I decided to take a class on non-fiction writing.  I’ve been enjoying it, so when our instructor mentioned that her first book was about the first year of marriage, I snapped it up.

Wedding Cake for Breakfast is a funny, relatable collection of essays from well-known women writers.  And it’s nice to know that nearly everyone finds the first year of marriage challenging.  Though hopefully they’ll write a sequel about what it’s like to be trapped in your house with your spouse during a global pandemic while you try to figure out if there’s ever going to be a right time to think about future plans when every day is just about survival.

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