June 3, 2026
On the summer evenings of my childhood, my family would cruise country roads, tracing the patchwork of northern Indiana and southwest Michigan (aka Michiana. Yes, for real, look it up.) in our 90’s Dodge Durango. The sun, still shining high in the sky after dinnertime, gilded the rolling fields and subtle slopes left behind from the roving glaciers of the Great Lakes. We bounced along the freshly graded dirt roads – a family of four peering out of our respective windows at the bountiful acres that lay before us. Our eyes would survey the wildflowers and tall grasses that lined the borders of our well-worn route. Fat groundhogs would scamper off in our slow-moving wake. With the windows slightly parted, a humid breeze would roll onto our foreheads, kissing our sweat.
Yeah, that sounds nice. Bucolic, even. But I have a truth to confess.
These drives were not the pastoral family fun times I have led you to believe. These drives were rock-scouting missions. Boring, bang-my-head-against-a-window, “Can we please go home already?” car trips for the sole purpose of looking for free landscaping rocks. Rock-onnaissance, if you will. I spent multiple hours of my precious and fleeting childhood summers looking for rocks. And not in the budding geologist kind of way. Now look, I’m not trying to rag on rocks. I’m not a rock hater and I support rock nerds as long as they haven’t sold out to Big Oil. But imagine that you’re eleven years old, it’s a beautiful summer day, and you’re stuck in a slow-moving SUV with instructions to look for rocks that would look nice next to the hostas. Also, you have a maxi-pad stuffed in your plaid bermuda shorts and there’s only Christian radio stations on the presets. And your teenage brother smells! Ughhhh!
We would look for rocks on the roadside and rocks at the edges of woodland and rocks in farmer’s fields – the latter only plucked with permission, of course. All kinds of rocks, too. Boulders to fill space and provide visual balance, flat slabs for stepping stones, football-sized rocks to line garden edges, etc. Boring, sweaty, and dirty work. Now, these trips were part of a larger array of home project-based activities. For the bulk of my childhood, it seemed as if every weekend was spent at Lowes, Menards, Home Depot, or a combination of the three. And if we escaped the clutches of the big box hardware store that meant that we were in a greenhouse, on a rock-onnaissance mission, or worse: doing the actual labor that the supplies demanded. Weeding, mowing, digging, planting, sanding, painting, staining, cleaning, watering, hauling, chopping, wheelbarrowing, moving, sweating, aching. And finally, rinsing ourselves off with the hose before being able to go inside. It seemed as if there was no end to the landscaping projects that my parents dreamed – every summer brought new work.
During college and into my mid-20s I was freed from the kind of summertime manual labor that plagued my youth. Sure, I put out potted plants on my apartment balcony and even invested an entire summer into a community garden plot. And yes, I may have had a small composting set-up for said garden. But these efforts were quaint. I even began to understand what people meant when they said they “loved to get their hands in the dirt.” Then I bought a house.
Dear reader, nothing could have prepared me for the sickness that overwhelmed my financial and energy-reserving senses when I became a property owner. It’s as if every dirt-dusted neuron in my stupid little brain went into overdrive the second we signed the closing paperwork. I downloaded the Lowes app. I started drawing garden diagrams in my notebook. I went so far as to create photo mock-ups so that I could envision the placement of the plants in both the front and back garden beds. The plants, of course, that I most definitely would be buying as soon as the nurseries opened for the season.
It’s been two years since we moved in and I wish I could say that the impulse to do outdoor manual labor has improved but I fear that my condition has only worsened. The garden beds have expanded. The local conservation district has my contact information from their annual plant sale. The teen cashier at the local hardware store has sold me mulch not once, not twice, but three times in one day (I’m unwilling to do the math on cubic feet). And this year, for the first time, I went out on my own rock-onnaissance missions. But you see, I needed the rocks! The growing border of the front yard Monarch Waystation bed demanded the rocks! And they had to come from somewhere! Preferably somewhere where I wouldn’t have to pay for them! So I drove through the country – moving slowly and bumping along the dirt roads with my window down.
I’ve realized that I don’t know what it feels like to sit in complete contentment in my own space. Ironically, I can find this feeling easily in wild, untamed nature. But in my yard? There’s always something to do. What is this impulse to suffer in gardening gloves? Is it desire to exert control on my surroundings? Is it to showcase my taste in plants or my ability to balance a dangerously overloaded wheelbarrow? Is it some weird 1950’s Good Housekeeping-esque way to display status? Is it genetic? And most importantly, don’t you think a pea gravel circle would look really nice around the fire pit?
TL;DR – As far as I can tell, the compulsion to do back-breaking landscaping work every time the sun comes out is a chronic illness.
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