But Julie showed up.
We’re redoing our front yard. It’s only a hair bigger than a postage stamp and only seems to be able to sustain crabgrass, bermuda, and weeds. We are abandoning grass completely and gunning for a Monet-ish garden.
We continue to be the bane of the neighborhood. Last Fall, I sprayed the whole yard with Round-Up, still thinking we might attempt grass. We went with this dead look for about six months. This Spring, a lovely crop of weeds sprang up. Then I reconnected with a friend from high school who has a master’s degree in landscape architecture. She agreed to help us out. Her first act in transforming our dirt and weeds into a Monet painting was to dump a truck load of topsoil in the front yard and a truck load of mulch in the driveway.
In case you don’t have boys, you may not fully appreciate the lure of a huge mound of black dirt on an eight-year-old’s psyche. After we finished homework, Silas, Lily, Silas’ two neighborhood buddies, and I began spreading dirt with an assortment of shovels, pitch forks, rakes, a borrowed wheel barrow, and a wagon. We all anticipated Paul’s enthusiasm and gratitude when he saw his army of zealous helpers. My understanding was that Paul was coming home early to help spread dirt. Instead, we welcomed home a tired, grumpy daddy who was not early.
Paul’s love language is “quality time” (The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman). That means he feels loved and demonstrates love by doing things with the people he cares about – camping, hiking, going to a ball game or movie, going anywhere, really, as long as we’re together. Paul often works in the yard alone (not on the grass), but he truly enjoys the “quality time” opportunity yard work offers.
Not today.
He looked on our questionable landscape team with utter bewilderment. He proceeded to ask why we had done this and why we had done that. After some sort of unkind muttering to Paul which our little gardening crew witnessed, I, furious, sent all the kids to the back yard. I stomped around putting tools and wheel barrows away, secretly vowing not to touch the yard ever again, as long as I live. Paul, equally brooding, at least in my imagination, went off to mow what little grass we do have.
The three boys had a little squabble in the back yard, and not being in much of a peace-keeping mood, I sent everybody home. I wonder if they thought I had gone insane. They generally believe I’m sort of a fun mom.
Not today.
I walked into my room to freshen up so I could cook dinner and found both Lily and Silas, still FILTHY, lying on MY bed watching television. I lost it. I unleashed all my wrath on my pumpkins, turning off the television in the middle of a favorite program (Phineas and Ferb is the most hilarious cartoon ever created!), shouting all sorts of admonitions for having grungy feet, hands, clothes, and everything on MY bed, evicting everyone to pursue showers. Lily started bawling, “I just helped you for four hours [it was actually more like two]. Why are you being so mean to me?” I did confess that I was mad at Daddy, not so much at her, but I did want her nasty self off MY bed.
I was banging and tossing things around in the kitchen when Paul appeared. “I was trying to speak YOUR love language” is as far as I got. I realized someone else was in the kitchen with us, but I thought it was Lily. She was behind me, so I only saw her enter in my peripheral vision. I suddenly realized it wasn’t Lily; it was Julie.
Julie is a missionary kid we got to know last year at RVA. Her parents also worked at the school and are some of our dearest friends. Paul has known her parents longer than he’s known me. When Julie decided to go to Wake Tech for college, we invited her to live with us. That’s why she was in the kitchen; she lives here.
God sent Julie to the kitchen at that precise moment! Before I could lay into Paul with all my hurt feelings and “You can do the *$%@# yard by yourself from now on,” Paul and I both fell out laughing. Julie had no idea she had circumvented an argument. Later she told me she was thinking, “How cool that they’re talking about the love language book.” She recently read the love language book, and like I felt when I first read it, she thinks it’s the greatest insight into relationships since the creation of marriage.
Thanks to Julie, I wasn’t mad any more. We’ve had the movie Fireproof from Netflix for over a month and still haven’t watched it. We joked during dinner that perhaps we should watch it now. Later, we were able to have a civilized conversation about the yard debacle. The truth of the matter is, very little is worth going to war over. And having a college student live with you is good for the soul on multiple levels. ~ cck