May Flowers

The month of May for me means planting flowers and creating graduation slideshows. I have spent every spare minute the last couple of weeks working on DVD slideshow presentations that I create yearly for the school that I used to teach at. The slideshows are shown at graduation and contain pictures of every student throughout the school year. I enjoy working on them and being connected in a way to my teaching days, but after finishing the 15th slideshow yesterday, I was happy to turn my work efforts into caring for our yard instead of staring at a computer screen. It felt good to pull all of those overgrown weeds and plant some flowers around our tulips.

Speaking of yard work, my husband is sneaky sneaky in his efforts to do as little yard work as possible. He absolutely detests manual labor, so when we attended our church youths' auction fundraiser last weekend, he outbid everyone for any services involving mowing and snow shoveling. To my surprise, after an impeccable mowing service was rendered to us today by a teenage boy, Troy hired him to mow our lawn for the rest of the summer! I was a little peeved at first since I don't think that we need mowing services when we are in our mid-twenties. However, I think that $15 a week is probably the best money we will ever spend on improving our marriage. Our Saturdays will no longer consist of me plotting the best way to motivate Troy to mow the lawn. He will no longer be nagged and nagged and nagged when it gets to be three weeks since the previous mowing. Troy and I don't disagree about much, but my blood boils just thinking about the tension involved in the past when discussing the chore of lawn mowing. Our summer will be much happier now that I can always look out the window and see clean lines on our grass. Procrastination, guilt, and nagging will be eliminated from our conversations. I sit here taking in the sweet scent of our blooming lilac tree through the window and I feel lighter already.