Jul. 25, 2002 ~ Good Enough
"Good enough" is a whole new concept for me. I'm trying to make it work. It used to take me four to six hours to mow the yard, even with a riding lawn mower. Obviously, it's a big yard, and we have a long driveway, too. And there's the garden patch; we have to mow around that. I also used to mow a strip in the pastures around the outside of the yard, because Husband had always done it that way. And I mowed a path down to and all around the big pond. Made it easier to see the snakes, and we are covered up with snakes.
But my goodness, that's a lot of mowing. In the Texas heat. And lately it's had to be done twice a week, because of all the rain we've had. Sometime in the past year or two, I started to let a little of the mowing go. First to go was the path to the pond. Then the strips of pasture around the fence. What I'm working on now... is trying not to be so obsessive about "mowing" the loose grass out of the driveway. By that I mean driving back and forth down the driveway after the mowing is done, blowing the cut grass to the sides. That all takes a while, a very long while. But doing it less perfectly, well, maybe it's good enough. It takes half as long, too. And in a place where there are never enough hours of daylight, because of all the chores to be done, sometimes that's just fine.
Other things are good enough, too. We once lived in a beautiful, nearly new house in a pretty little town. The house was maybe three years old when we bought it, and the previous owners had been immaculate housekeepers, so it was in wonderful shape. It looked even better when we left, what with all the flowers we planted, all the landscaping we did. When we decided to move to the country, we faced a dilemma. It was much harder finding a country home than a city home; in fact it took every bit of two years of serious looking. What we encountered were beautiful pieces of property with hideous, falling-down houses, or pretty houses on horrible land. We began to say things like, "If we could just find a halfway-decent house on a pretty piece of land, that would suit us just fine."
Be careful what you wish for.
That's exactly what we got... a halfway-decent house on a beautiful piece of land. Granted, it's an older house, and the previous owners cut a lot of corners in terms of building it and in later repairs. So things are always falling apart, and I worry about things like... oh, the roof. The foundation. The plumbing, the wiring... you name it. But amid all that worry and fretting (and I am the admitted Queen of Fretting), I still love this place, because the "place" is so much more than the house. The place is the land, the mountain, the ponds, and the woods. The pastures. Each and every daffodil that we planted. All the animals that share our space, both domestic and wild. So while things are far from perfect and I spend way too much time worrying and wondering how we are ever going to pay for all the stuff that goes wrong, life is still pretty good.
This place has another name, but we probably should have called it the "Good Enough Ranch." Or maybe the "Pretty Good Farm."
Sometimes you have to let go of perfection, and let things be good enough.
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