I have two cities listed on my phone’s weather app, the primary cities between which my heart will always be divided: New York and Atlanta. During months like this, when living in the Southeast affords one an early spring and living in New York affords one more winter, I check the app often to note differences. The Husband emailed yesterday with information of the same: “80 degrees in Atlanta and 40/snowing in NYC. We made the right cboice.” Yes, we did.  But we have our own outdoor issues here in the sun.

Our beautifully brown and ungrowing yard took a turn for the worse this week, bursting forth in glorious green. For two people sans experience in lawn care and landscaping (business and dental school offered shockingly little in the way of such courses), this development was bad news indeed. After a simple question put to my brother-in-law resulted in a fifteen-minute summation of the time, knowledge, and financial requirements necessary to not being The House with the Junky Yard, TH and I looked at each other and said in unison: “Let’s hire someone.” (Then I asked if this meant we would now be splitting the labor of my biweekly housecleaning frenzy. I’m still waiting for him to figure out the right answer to that question, because laughter is. Not. It.)

Our front/back yard combo is…a hair larger than my old fire escape. This feature, desirable during house-hunting (which occurred during winter), is now overwhelming. My neurotic mind imagines all the wildlife crawling around out there in our untamed forest of grass and trees. And then I remember that thing called gratitude and, armed with a folding chair and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I head out to our patio. My muscles tense, ready to jump as a wasp hovers nearby. I remind myself that there’s no such thing as a killer squirrel. I warm up my throwing arm in case a stray cat ventures across the fence. I will enjoy nature, dammit!

A fly lands in my wine.

I was a child who knew how to extract the sweetness from a honeysuckle blossom, who raced against sunset on her bike, who danced among fireflies. Then I grew up and moved to New York, where outside is (a) the area of transition between point A and point B, or (b) a great place to eat and drink, at a sought-after table outside an overpriced restaurant. I may have forgotten that childlike appreciation of nature. As I fidget in my folding chair and the wasp inches closer, I realize how hard it is for me to just sit still out here, reading my book on gratitude. To just be here within the beauty, to even see it as beauty. My lens needs washing, because all I see is a yard full of work (for someone else) and money spent (for us).

I read more on gratitude, washing my own lens.

A few minutes later I look up and see it. The garden planted by the previous owner’s daughter is overgrown and chaotic, but there is a splash of pink amidst the disarray. I walk up to the picket fence and stare. A dozen blushing blooms greet me, who did nothing to put them there. All the work wrought by another’s hands, the hours of planting and waiting and hoping and pruning, my free gift. TH gets home and walks out to meet me and I show him the flowers. A few minutes later, our seventy-something retired neighbor–the one who mows his yard in a World’s Best Grandpa t-shirt as we watch our grass grow, shame-faced, from our window–walks up to our shared fence with his wife. He compliments our yard and we laugh, then realize he’s serious.

“So much potential,” he says. And I realize how clean a lens can be, to see right through the mess and into the future.

I ask him what the pink bloom is, recognizing the red roses climbing trellises in his yard. “Camellia,” he offers, with some information about their blooming schedule and care. He points out a rhododendron bush as TH and I nod, not really understanding this strange new language. “And that,” he concludes, “is a little cedar tree. About the only good thing you can say about it is that it can survive a drought!”

A memory flashes across my mind’s screen: a time a few years ago when I kept running across, and fixating on, biblical mentions of trees. They’re everywhere in those pages, if you want to know–palm, fig, acacia. Cedars are a favorite, valued for their resistance to insects, their height, and their lifespan. They were used to build the temple in Jerusalem. And we have a tiny one in our yard.

It will take learning and time for me to enter the phase of Full Yard Appreciation. The other day, TH pointed to some purple dots in the front yard and said, “Look! We have flowers!” Without missing a beat, I replied, “Those are weeds,” and watched his face drop. After assuring him that they could be flowers if he wanted them to be (and therefore remain unpulled), I headed to my gratitude journal and wrote, “a husband who looks at a weed and sees a flower.”

All too often I walk about with my head lowered, pointing out life’s weeds. But–my weed-averse husband, knowing my love of cherry blossom trees, has grown adept at pointing them out and watching me simultaneously squeal with delight and grab my phone to take a picture. The deepest and truest part of me always comes back to the tree, how time began to fall apart at the foot of one and how all our restoration was completed on one.

I may still be learning this outdoor business, but I know when to look up and see the trees.