My Yard

The other day I got email from a friend I haven't seen in quite some time. When I met her she lived in San Francisco but now she lives here in Israel, about a 45-minute bus ride from my house in Jerusalem. I have not seen her since I've been here. She and I are almost exactly the same age but our lives could hardly be more different.

She is married and has two-point-five kids. She owns a home and a car. She does two loads of laundry, minimum, a day. She drives preschool carpool. She goes shopping for diapers.

I am mysteriously, profoundly single and don't even have houseplants anymore. I have a legal mailing address in the States at a place where I have never lived except for the times I've slept over on the couch because I was too lonely to stay in my own apartment by myself. I have not had a car for nine months now and either take the bus everywhere or walk. Tonight before bed I washed out some clothes in the sink and hung them on the radiator. I go shopping for toilet paper, but only when I remember.

In a recent email conversation she and I were talking about traveling. Right now she is in the States visiting family and I am living here in Israel. They arrived in the Midwest with suitcases and baby seats and all the accessories of family life. I have one bag full of books and art supplies and a portable suction-cup-ended clothesline which has remained packed almost the entire time I've been here, and a massive backpack from REI. Her kids are messy and go through three changes of clothing a day. Here with me in this hemisphere, I have only five pairs of pants.

"I am so jealous of you right now..." she e-sighed the other day in one of our conversations. The expression "the grass is always greener" came to mind, as it also did when reading about Rebecca's Thanksgiving/birthday weekend back east or Aaron's amazing co-op household in Providence or Matt's potential plans for his upcoming free choice time or Laura's pie-baking escapades. And then I thought more about it, and remembered that even though it is hard or scary or confusing or sad sometimes I am actually doing, right this very instant, what I said for years that I wanted to do--leave my home to live in the world. Can I do that and at the same time want to buy cans of sweetened condensed milk and visit the deYoung and climb under the covers to read bedtime stories to a toddler all at the same time? Yes. Is the grass always greener? I am not sure that is fair, or helpful, to say. Maybe it is more true to say that we each just have our own yards, complete with flowers and weeds and stone paths and hammocks and goldfish ponds. Seeing someone else's yard can help you get ideas for your own but at the end of the day it is our own life to which we come home. I am learning about how to make my yard a place that is just right for me. I suppose perhaps we all are and I understand now why some people take such delight in gardening, because making my life the way I want it to be is really a pretty satisfying process when I stop mowing the lawn long enough to think about it.