Hey {{First Name | there}},

I've been sitting with that question for weeks, though I couldn’t put a name to it until I started this essay. It crept up quietly, somewhere in the middle of a long winter spent inside a house that isn't working yet — a house we chose deliberately, because we believed in what it could become.

The circles we've talked in. The shame that surprised me. The endless wondering: should we stay, should we move, should we just accept it as is, what will it take/cost to make it what we want, is that even possible?

And underneath all of it, this uncomfortable feeling that wanting more — wanting beauty — was somehow suspect.

Then I started reading Tottering in My Garden by Midge Ellis Keeble, which was published in 1994.

A book that came into my hands serendipitously from a Free Little Library coop along our neighborhood forest trail. I was drawn to it at the end of last summer, then this weekend, with the first glimmer of true spring, I was overcome with the need to read it.

I've spent the past three nights reading through it feeling like I am being mentored back to the heart of creativity.

Midge wrote the book in her seventies. It's a memoir of 40 years and six gardens across six different houses. Each one came with its own impossible challenges — ground that wasn't workable, spaces that made no sense, projects that didn't go as planned. The lengths this woman went to to create gardens and homes that captured her vision and worked for her family are astounding.

She never apologizes. Not once.

She acknowledges mistakes, names oversights, moves on. She hired people, ordered what she needed, solved the problem in front of her.

Even though I had read the back of the book and knew she'd created six gardens, I truly was shocked every time I turned the page to discover she had moved away. Added to the shock was how she kept moving to houses that were less garden-able than the previous.

She created these majestic, beautiful gardens with intentionality, so much hard work — then moved on. This challenged me.

The permanence was never the point. The creating was the point.

That felt like something worth paying attention to.

Join me in my interrogation of what I think we get wrong about wanting a beautiful home.

This isn't a new question for me. A few years ago, when we bought what I call our dream house in New Mexico, I wrote about the shame that crept in almost immediately — the guilt of wanting something material, the fear that I'd traded the wrong things to get it, the sense that wanting a home this much meant something was off about my priorities. I wrote a poem about learning to live in it.

I thought I'd resolved it. And then we moved here, and the question came back. Different house, same interrogation.

Here's what I keep coming back to: somewhere along the way, most of us collapse two things that are actually completely different — wanting beauty and wanting status.

Wanting status is anxious. Outward-reaching. It's about approval, about belonging, about getting somewhere safe where everything will finally be okay.

Wanting beauty in a home is something else entirely.

It's an act of creation. It's present, intentional, hopeful. It says: I believe that something I do here, with what I have, can make this place better. It's oriented toward others as much as yourself — toward the hosting, the retreat, the welcome, the people who might pass through or come after you.

They are not the same thing.

But often we treat them like they are. And that confusion creates guilt and stuckness.

There's also the voice that catalogs the would-have-beens.

It would have been better to wait. Better to buy something turnkey. Better to have known the area longer, negotiated harder, chosen differently.

Better than what, exactly?

There was no version of this move that could have happened without trade-offs. No decision that would have delivered us here without struggle. That's not what a wrong choice looks like. That's just what a choice looks like.

And believing otherwise is just a way of making the present feel like a mistake instead of a chapter. How refreshing to remember life has chapters!

Midge understood this. She created six beautiful gardens and left every single one of them. The leaving wasn't failure. It was just life, moving forward. Each garden was its own chapter — complete, valuable, hers — regardless of what came next.

So here is where I actually am with my house and garden.

For the past few weeks, the one thing I've done is go outside and spray the tulips.

The previous owners loved them. My dad planted new bulbs with my sons this fall. So I've been out there with an organic garlic, onion, and thyme spray — keeping the deer away, protecting what's already trying to grow.

The garden is chaotic. The tulips are scattered, not the shape I eventually want. There are walnut shells everywhere. This weekend I dug dead leaves out of all the undergrowth, clearing what got trapped over winter.

I've been getting to know the land. And now with Midge's help, I'm able to see what a gift it is that I can be the one to work it. This morning in my journal I wrote down all of my ideas to make it a beautiful garden oasis.

And it feels so good. Also completely unmanageable. But that's because I'm jumping ahead to the finished vision, rather than starting at step 1 — creating a mulch barrier between lawn and forest.

We spent all weekend outside because it's just — delightful. This is why we bought the house.

If I’m going to be out there anyway, I might as well work it, make it beautiful and teach my kids while I’m at it.

It's okay the garden is imperfect. It's okay the house is stuck in the 90s with its boxy layout and low ceilings. We will work on those things. And if we decide to move on someday, we can.

But when I think about all the life that has been lived here in just the past three days, I'd say this house and yard are doing exactly what we bought them for. Giving us a beautiful life and space to enjoy our family years.

Midge's gardens weren't permanent. They weren't perfect. But they were hers, fully and without apology, for as long as they were hers to tend.

I want to live like that.

Not because the outcome is guaranteed. But because the creating — the showing up, the protecting what's trying to grow, the slowly making something more beautiful than you found it — that's not a means to an end.

That's the thing itself.

— Jennifer