Getting ready to miss it.

Surrounded by boxes and spackled holes, she put it perfectly: “I’ve never had to say goodbye to a place I loved that I wasn’t able to go back to.”

My roommate said this as we sat on the dusty hardwood of our empty living room. We were saying farewell to a thumbtack of a duplex we’d called home for four significant years.

It was the end of a chapter we knew was inevitable and it hurt in all the ways I anticipated.

On a morning in the days leading up to turning in our keys, I heard a knock as I was packing up. The twang of Dolly Parton played in the entryway as I opened the door to find our neighbor—a longtime tenant of one of the upper apartments who overlooked our backyard.

He said he noticed we were moving and wanted to come by to thank me.

I’d spoken to this man maybe twice in the years we’d lived there, and I had no clue what he had to thank me for.

He started, “Thank you for all the work you did in the backyard. You kept it thriving and it was so nice to look down and see something so alive.” I took this to heart from a man whose apartment balcony was stuffed with thriving, exotic plants. He went on, “I saw you out there the other day and you were just walking, looking around at it all…it looked like you were getting ready to miss it.”

He hit a nerve. I felt tears welling and my hold on the doorknob tightened.

I’d been preparing to grieve my little oasis of a yard for months. I knew goodbye was approaching and in the same succinct manner my roommate articulated her grief, my neighbor put words to mine.

I was getting ready to miss it.

The tiny plot of earth behind our home was more than a brick patio, a garden, and a set of string lights. The gift of that yard salvaged the pieces of me years prior and I’d been pouring my heart and soul into it ever since.

Heading into 2020, I was saturated with workaholism—my drug of choice. I was balancing three jobs, trying to maintain a social life, volunteering, packing two lunches each morning, and forcing myself to nap in between shifts to make it through the day.

I try to remember why I was pushing so hard and I think it was a combination of financial need and this desperate desire to justify why I was in Sacramento. I’d just moved to the city the year before and life was still in its building stages. I piled on a lot at once. It was too much and I knew it. But I kept going.

To stop would be to fail.

To make matters worse, within that timeframe, I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer.

What a mistake.

One statistic shared within its pages grabbed me by the collar, took me outside, and kicked my ass.

I tried looking for the exact excerpt to no avail, however, the gist of it was that statistically, people who take one full day off per week—no chores, no work, no meetings, nothing but rest, a snow day for the soul—on average, live ten years longer than people who don’t.

What did ten years mean to me? When I read it as a twenty-four-year-old, my first thoughts were: ten years of seeing my nephews and nieces grow up, ten years of traveling, ten years of deepening friendships, ten years of eating great food and drinking red wine.

Essentially, if this statistic rang true, I was likely exchanging a decade of delight when I decided to stack on that extra shift, fill in that gap of time with another project, or use my day off to get more work done.

I was both sobered and furious by this statistic as it seemed people who did what it took to survive were the ones getting punished with shorter lifespans. First off, how was that fair? But in the same breath, I can’t ignore the irony that I was working myself into the ground to build a life I didn’t even have time to enjoy.

It was only until the world was turned upside down by the pandemic that spring that I was blinded by the realization of how much life I flush down the drain when I overload myself trying to sustain it. Lockdown gave me permission to indulge in what I love in a way that I would’ve never granted myself under normal circumstances. As someone who chronically over-works, through restoring my yard, rest became something tangible to me for the first time in my adult life.

The gift of stewarding that garden tethered me in a way my mind and soul desperately needed.

When we moved in, the yard was nothing more than dirt and weeds, a palm tree, and a patio. In the wake of work furloughs and cut-back hours, I was ecstatic with the influx of free time to use for weeding, planting, potting, and raking.

The days I began to look forward to were mornings I got to dedicate to a Green Acres run and an afternoon caked with dirt.

I’d work in the yard all day, cleaning, pruning, and planting, the sound of books or podcasts running through my headphones and the sun feeding life to my bones.

When I was done, I’d take a body shower. Standing under the stream, I’d watch the drain as earth melted off me letting my thoughts settle as I waited for the water to run satisfyingly clear.

Clean and tired, I’d sit on the patio and eat peaches from a cold jar I kept in the fridge.

This simple afternoon is the closest thing I have to describe my absolute bliss. Stewarding. Investing with my whole heart. A hot shower followed by a cold snack in the sun.

I need nothing else.

Like anything I take good care of, I fell deeply in love with this yard.

It became a sanctuary I could decompress, an environment that gave me calm, something I could nurture and watch grow over time.

But with every shrub I shoveled a hole for and every vine I cut back, I knew one day I’d say goodbye to it all. I wouldn’t be living there long enough to see this yard to its full potential.

I was getting ready to miss it even as I sowed its seeds.

This past month, I packed up my garden tools, I put my feet in the grass I worked hard to grow one last time, I wished the best of luck to the garden bed I cultivated compost to feed, and I thanked this piece of earth for giving me a deep breath every time I came to it.