Dad said he was going to come by yesterday evening and trim a few limbs off the tree in the back so the garden got more sun. When we left for dinner, he was on a step ladder with a set of loppers.

When we came home he was on an extension ladder with an electric saw.

Those few limbs were about as much as a medium sized tree all over our yard.

We went from bundling a few limbs to him calling for a special trash pick up this week. But those last two tomato plants (two of 24, remember) will get more sun this summer.

I’ve had a great week working with Daddy on our garden. You may recall that I said I wanted to learn how to garden this year. I bought a book. I bought some seeds. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to grow yet, but I figured I would give it a try.

And then my father got involved.

Really my whole family got involved since my brother Perry joined forces too. First we spent all day two weeks ago getting the yard tilled. We had about 14′ of garden ready for crops in my back yard. I thought I would grow some tomatoes, some squash, maybe some herbs in a pot. When I got home the other day, Daddy and Perry were planting the last of the tomatoes they were putting in my yard.

There are 24 tomato plants in my back yard.

After Daddy and Perry planted all their tomatoes, they realized they hadn’t left much room for my other vegetables. So Daddy came back with the tiller and added another 7.5′ to the garden. He also had to add more fencing to keep the dogs (and toddler) from killing the plants inside. And move the gate he created.

So Saturday morning Daddy and I started planting our squash and eggplant and cucumbers. There was a lot of hemming and hawing about what to put where, but we have a decent plan. We are going to experiment with some carrots too this week.

Like so many projects with my father, he does about 75% of the work. But I was there to assist and keep him on target and listen to his stories. It was a joy. He was in the best mood out there in the dirt that I’ve seen in years. He also said he wished he could find a job that was about as active as this gardening he’s been doing because it makes his body feel better too.

When I stopped by their house this afternoon, I got to see Daddy’s garden as well. That’s when I did a quick count and realized he also had 29 tomato plants in his yard. While I counted this, Perry and Daddy were filling large pots so that Perry could add a dozen tomato plants to his yard.

Let me do the math for you. Our family has 65 tomato plants in progress. We never do anything halfway.

It was funny that my supposed new project of learning to garden has involved watching or helping Daddy do things the way he wanted, but I figured since he lived and worked on a farm he had more experience than I do. And I’m sure I’ll have many years one day when I’ll have to figure out a garden on my own. But for now I’m happy to play in the dirt with Dad and do things his way. That’s what memories are made of.

But I did learn that Daddy has less than zero interest in herbs. So I still get to putter with some plants of my own without him messing in them. I have basil and thyme and cilantro and soon hope to have mint.

And I may have bought three more Roma tomato plants to put by the back door for guacamole. That makes 68 tomato plants then.

We never do anything halfway.

A few days ago, I went by my parents to visit and coincidentally my mother had uncovered a box of old photos. Since several photos were literal snapshots into my family over the years, I took a few of them to my therapy appointment to show Gary. I reminded him that my father and his family are all from Edgecombe County in North Carolina on a road that bears their last name since everyone living on it was from our family. He looked at the portrait of my mother from 1967 and said, “where is your mother from?”

Me: “Oh, she’s from Ocean View.”
Gary: “No, but where is her family from?”
Me: “Well, she was born in Raleigh I think, but they all moved to Ocean View when she was really little.”
Gary: “No, before that. She looks a little Mediterranean.”
Me: “Oh! I have no idea. I’m not good at genealogy. She’s from where we live now.”

My father was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and lived on the same farm his whole childhood, one with its own family graveyard. Recently, though, he and Mom talked about picking a plot out over on Granby Street, just a few miles from where we are now.

As for me, there is definitely a very small radius of real estate that I call home. I’m irrationally dedicated to this neighborhood. I had been living across the state in Christiansburg, married and with a full-time job, when we drove back to Norfolk for a visit. I had the window down as we came out of the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel and when the salt air hit me I suddenly realized that I was home. I wish I could bottle up that smell to share with you.

On the day I told Jeremy our marriage was over, I handed back my wedding rings and drove home. I stayed in a rental property of my parents, sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, but I was back in the neighborhood where I rode my bike as a kid. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach then (since I was only a block from it) and came to realize how much I needed to be near the water.

Soon after that, I moved to another rental property that I eventually bought from my parents. Rich and I had many discussions while he was living many miles away in Richmond as to who would move for us to share an address, but I think we both knew that the further I was from Ocean View, the harder it would be on me. I come by this irrational behavior naturally. When Rich and I talked about moving to the next neighborhood over (a whopping four miles away), my mother lamented “I don’t know why you have to go so far.” So of course when Rich and I shopped for a larger home than our original house together, I would lament that certain houses we saw while walking the dog were “too far.”

Rich: “You realize we got here on foot from our current house?”
Me: “Yeah, but it’s too far. I can’t walk to the water or my parents’ house from here.”

That said, I consider any space I share with Rich to be Home, wherever it is. He was gone all day yesterday and I spent most of my day either doing laundry or moping about the house waiting for him to come home. Where do I feel safe and content? Wherever Rich is.

But where am I from? I’m from a part of the coast that is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than other cities inland. I’m from a shoreline protected by the Chesapeake Bay, so the water is perfect for learning to swim in the summer. I’m from a neighborhood where live oaks twist into shapes like giant bonsai trees and create so much shade that they make “clean swept yards” of sand and tiny acorns. I live just far enough away from the water to not have to buy flood insurance but to still put sheets of plywood over our windows when a hurricane comes.

Our local grocery store is equally frequented by poor families and yuppies, and there are nearly as many rainbow flags as American flags on front porches. This area was the place to be in the 40s and 50s, a place to avoid in the 80s, and is slowly turning back into the place to be again now. But some of us have been here all along.

We’ve learned to swim in these waters, learned to rollerskate on these sidewalks, frequented every single 7-Eleven available to us, practiced driving a stick shift on the dead end roads near the inlets and struggled to peddle our bikes up the hills of the Bay streets. And with a baby on the way, I look forward to creating another “OV lifer.” I still can’t quite bear to get one of those “OV before it was cool” bumper stickers, though.

Thursday morning Rich flushed the toilet upstairs and the kitchen sink downstairs filled with water. I spent the morning bailing out the sink while he finished his shower. And then I sent an email to my father.

Over Thursday and Friday my father and I spent a fair amount of time under the house. The plumbing issues involved moving the clean out from under the house through the foundation, using Daddy’s auger to investigate the clog and cutting out a five foot section of iron pipe. But those details aren’t very important.

The important parts of this adventure were all the little moments with my father. Daddy has a pretty intense paranoia streak so that when we met a significant resistance in the clean out line, he was convinced that our contractors from eight months ago had sabotaged our plumbing. He went down a list of every worker on that he’d ever had a conflict with, and that’s not a short list.

We marveled at the strength of plumbers “back in the day” who could heft length of iron pipe around under houses. I waited while my father straightened pipe edges with the circular saw over and over and over until I worried there wouldn’t be much pipe left. I learned that when my sense of smell is this keen, it’s not the greatest to spend two days around raw sewage, burning PVC and iron and plumbing cement. And we spent a lot of time “shucking corn.”

My father tells a story about a farmer that hired a farm hand to shuck corn. He told him to throw the rotten ears in one pile to be ground up and the ones that were still okay but not edible for people into a pile for the hogs. When the farmer came back at lunch, the farm hand had barely made two pitiful piles of corn. The farmer shook his head and decided to at least let the poor kid finish out the day but told him just to shuck all the ears into one pile. The farmer came back at the end of the day and the farm hand had made a mountain of corn! When he asked the farm hand why he had done so little that morning and so much that afternoon, the farm hand shrugged and said “all those decisions were slowing me down.”

In any project our family undertakes we spend a lot of time deciding just exactly what we’re going to do and then a smaller chunk of time painstakingly following through with those decisions. I spent a fair amount of time this week just observing and marveling at how my father and I work together.

My father and I never had a father-daughter dance at my wedding. We don’t go out for fancy dinners to celebrate special occasions. But when he’s lying in a ditch trying to find the plumbing cement I can tell him “Back. Over. Down.” and he’ll put his hand right on it.

These are the days our memories are made of.

Since it has been 70 DEGREES THIS WEEKEND I wanted to work on some random projects around the house. Earlier this week, I had bought a bunch of tiles from Flor.com to become our new dining room rug and they thankfully arrived on Friday! Wooo, crazy Friday night at our house!

Sarah is a 12-year-old elderly stateshound and when sick or under stress has let us know by exploding in some portion of the dining room. Always the dining room. What can I say, she’s a creature of habit. I have actually watched her start to get sick (usually from eating grass outside) and just before she pukes in the kitchen on its convenient tile, she will sprint on her creaky little legs to the dining room to puke on the rug in there. Ugh.

I have an elaborate system for cleaning the carpet but it’s time-consuming and a bit neurotic. It keeps the carpet in good shape, but it takes a good hour each time it happens. When you have company showing up 45 minutes after you’ve discovered an accident or you’re already late for work, this can prove inconvenient.

We started using pee pads in her favorite spots on the old rug and those were working great except that our dining room didn’t have much decor what with the green and white diaper mats strewn everywhere. So I bit the bullet and bought a new rug.

This isn’t just any rug, though. It’s from Flor.com. They sell individual tiles that are 19.7″ square (it’s a metric thing) so you can mix and match. They all have rubber backings on them and they clean up amazingly well. I first read about them on Dooce.com when Heather raved on how she got wine off her carpet with a baby wipe – a baby wipe, people! I was instantly hooked. But they’re not cheap and I was chicken to pick out a set for a long time. Until now.

I ordered 49 tiles for the dining room, not really sure how many of them I would use and how many would become spares. With some tinkering, we worked out 35 of them in a 5×7 pattern and have stored the remaining 14 to be replacement tiles should anyone decide to pee or puke in the dining room (not naming any names or anything). I can’t tell you how pleased I am with these tiles! They went down super easy, the pattern was fun to make, they’re designed for heavy traffic and if we decide to put them somewhere else, they stack and fit in the back seat of a car. Try that with a Persian rug!

I’m now shopping for tiles for my craft room, which is a funky shape with two doors in it and lends itself well to tiles of carpet. Soon I will have no excuse to not be sewing all the time!

Along those lines, we finally cleaned all the crap out of the spare bedroom upstairs. I still had Christmas wrapping paper and accessories up there (and lots of them) so it was time to tidy. Those went to storage in the utility room, the piles of recycling made it to the actual recycling can and after six months of living here, I finally took all my fabric out of the trash bags we moved them in and into tubs on shelves. I have a lot of fabric and I really should work my way through these piles before I buy any more. The whole room, though, looks a thousand times bigger! Hooray finally moving in!

Other than that, I haven’t accomplished much. I’m headed outside to enjoy the sunshine a bit more before it’s back to work for another week. Here’s hoping this weather holds out or at least comes back to stay soon!