(Host) This summer, educator, writer and commentator Mary McCallum took a
break from the workaday world to do a few odd jobs, and discovered some
unexpected pleasures in the process.
(McCallum) I was in the
garden with Elvin. It was going to be a scorching day in a string of
hot ones during the July heat wave. Or heat and dust wave, as I often
called it. Weeks without rain turned the perennial flower beds rock
hard and coated Vermont cars with powdery road dust. Although I had
arrived at 8:00 a.m. to help Elvin in his vegetable garden, the sun had
already started to cook the top of my head. Worried about cooking my
brain too, I donned a floppy hat and followed him into his gardens that
were thick with thriving vegetables and battalions of weeds.
I’ve
been gardening for Elvin and his wife once a week this summer in my new
role as the go-to person for odd jobs. It’s a fractured work life that
has me bouncing between gardening, house cleaning, pet sitting, plant
sitting, wedding waitressing and freelance writing. The variety and
pace suit me, and I’ve found unanticipated benefits and pleasures to
being a self-employed "odd job jenny" – like improved strength and
stamina. And discovering country roads I’ve never seen before, and
meeting new people who live on those roads. The experience has shown me
that if I want work, it’s out there.
But back to the garden.
Elvin offers to attack the overgrown raspberry patch if I tend to the
carpet of weeds knotted among the vegetables. While these wild invaders
can destroy a garden, I love their vivid names: sheep sorrel, purslane,
witchgrass, pigweed, lambs quarters, and the notorious and evil
goutweed – whose string of marvelous aliases includes Bishop’s Weed,
Jack Jumpabout, and my favorite, Farmer’s Plague.
I savor the
shade of the tall corn while crawling between its rows, hacking
ruthlessly with my sharp garden tool and tossing moisture-sucking weeds
into piles. Then out into the sun again, which burns into my back as I
find my rhythm. Time falls away, distilled to birdsong, the muffled
sound of a passing car, and dry rustling coming from the raspberry patch
where Elvin’s Asian coolie hat bobs above the canes. On my hands and
knees, my focus has shrunk to one square foot of soil. I am meticulous,
afloat in the zen of weeding.
Over a lifetime of work with long
stints in professional positions that drew upon my college degrees, job
satisfaction was sometimes elusive. There were the late day staff
meetings, an ever growing tsunami of paperwork, scores of emails to
respond to, unruly students and cranky colleagues. Often, the admirable
philosophy of the work and the joy of doing it became overshadowed by
the long hand of bureaucracy in its drive to do more with less. So at
least for this summer, I decided to turn that idea on its head: do less
and get more – joy that is.
In odd jobbing for others I have
been able to pay the bills, and for now, that’s enough. But it’s the
gardening and the zen of weeding that have handed me the moments to do
some of my clearest thinking. And even on my hands and knees, that
doesn’t feel like work.