We’re between thunderstorms here in the USA midwest, and the yard growth — some of it grass-like, most of it weed-like — is tall and lush and astonishingly green. It’s also getting a little out of hand, and I can’t seem to find a moment to mow it down before another swell of dark clouds appears overhead.

The garden I aspire to. Not the garden I have. Not even close.

For years I’ve been trying to shrink the mowing area of my yard. I’ve put in perennial beds and planted shrubs and such, and a tree here and there. But at the rate I’m going it’ll take a decade or more to eliminate the parts that need to be mowed.

Part of my slow progress is due to the fact that I’m a terrible gardener. I let my perennial beds get overrun with whatever wants to grow there alongside the lavender and coneflower and sedum and spiderwort, and the next thing I know, my beds are back to being a yard in need of mowing.

I was somewhat better at vegetables. But vegetables come with their own set of problems, ones I’m simply not interested in solving.

When I first moved to the midwest I had a cabin on four acres. At the time I thought I was the kind of person who would like having a garden. There were raised beds already in place, and I built a couple more, and filled them with herbs and tomatoes and peppers and garlic and collards and broccoli and whatever else came to mind. And it was all pleasant and manageable until I encountered the humidity of a midwest summer. And hornworms and cutworms. And cabbage moths that laid their eggs all over the broccoli. And the deer and rabbits that ate the cucumber and snap pea vines down to nubs.

Every summer for years I faced those hornworms, cutworms, cabbage moths, deer, rabbits, and that god-awful humidity. And then one spring I was too busy with work to plant any vegetables. And I ended up having a very nice summer for a change.

Wanting to be someone who likes gardening is not enough. Wanting to like something, or feeling like I ought to like something, is not the same as actually liking it. Seems obvious, but it took me a lot of years to be okay with the fact that growing vegetables is not my thing, even though I really, really wanted it to be my thing.  Or one of my things.

Now I leave the growing of edibles to others. I’m happy to support them with cash money at the farmers market and the co-op. The mowing and the perennial beds, however, are still mine to figure out. But guess what. I don’t have to figure them out today, because the thunder is rolling in once more, and I can hear the drops of rain just beginning to hit the roof.