"Rainy Days and Mondays"

Now that we have 3/4 of an acre of grassy lawn I value rainy days so much more. Even having a garden in the past three years didn't make me think much about the need for rain because small flower or vegetable beds can be easily watered, but watering grass is harder, not to mention wasteful.

Yesterday I stepped on every square foot of the lawn while mowing it with our self-propelled push mower. All our neighbors have those small tractor mowers, but besides the fact that we cannot afford one, it's good exercise to mow the lawn using a push mower. I do miss our electric lawnmower because it didn't pollute and was not as loud, but it really wouldn't help much with such a big yard. I love mowing the lawn, it's the type of work which provides instant results and gratification. It also makes me think intensely about our need to tame nature and green growing things because they are so "wild" that they would quickly overcome our efforts to control them, were they let free to grow.

It was raining today, and I was very glad and thankful for the rain and I'm sure the grass and my plants were too.

What brings me down right now are not rainy days nor Mondays, it's the uncertainty of our lives, of K's job. We have ups and downs, there are days when K feels more optimistic and others, like today, when he feels that it's not going to last long, that there's no way it's going to work out.

Since things turned around in such an unexpected way last December, I for the most time forget that our hopes are based on something very uncertain. Using a biblical metaphor, our hopes and lives right now are built upon sand, not rock. It was good to "pretend" that things were going well so I could have the peace of mind I needed in order to work on the dissertation, but now we're back to "real life." I feel devastated by the mere prospect of him losing his job again, but I know I should feel confident that everything will turn out OK in the end.

The biggest problem is this house. I've been repeating the mantra in my head that "this is not our house, it belongs to the bank, we're just 'renting' it from them in a way by paying the mortgage every month," but it's hard not to get attached to it, particularly after we're doing all these renovations and it begins to look much better and feel more ours. I don't want to be attached to things, though (and I am, most of the time, unfortunately), we don't need things to live, only very few of them. Maybe I need to learn this lesson, even if it is the hard way.

I should keep this in mind: we can live in this country, now. We can find new jobs, we can fly... I just wish we could know where we'll land and when.

I am just tired of not knowing.