Happiness

Most of life hasn’t turned out like I thought it would. Time and time again, my daydreams, those distracted internal vignettes of a future me smiling and looking healthy, turned out to be completely off the mark. It might sound sad to say that my happiness projections never materialized, but it’s OK. All of my dreams were based on what I knew, and I knew very little.

When I thought about having a child, I figured I would raise a kid like I was raised but better. I imagined that I would let my offspring do the things I didn’t get to do, and would encourage them in the ways I wasn’t encouraged. To be honest, I’m not sure why that was such a happy thought. I guess I thought that by making my child happy, I would be happy. Now I know better. Any parent can tell you that many of the things you do to make your kid happy make you miserable.

More importantly, my projections missed all of the things that are wonderful about having a kid. I never daydreamed about watching my son eat. If you have had a kid you know that watching a toddler mouth, chew, and swallow a banana is to witness an elongated experience of perfectly centered contentment. It is both fascinating and joyous to observe. Who knew?

None of my present life was anticipated. I couldn’t have hoped to live where I live, or work where I work, because they were unknown to me. I had never known anyone like my wife before I met her. Most importantly, I couldn’t even see who I would become. I am not the man I thought I would be, and, we can all thank God for that.

If, thirty years ago, you had pressed me about what would make me happy, I might have said “people.” That much is true. Real happiness comes from the people I love, the children I teach, and the friends I have. What I couldn’t have guessed is that I would find so much happiness in my yard.

I grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a suburb of New York City, which I wrote about back here. The yard of my childhood was a quarter acre in size. The only edible plant on it was a forgotten currant bush.

We kept the yard up. My mother had a garden. My father was, for the most part, completely uninterested. It seems kind of tenuous to think that my family was connected to the land in any way.

But there were threads. I can pull on some of them for you. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an Irish immigrant who owned a tobacco store on the Pawcatuck Bridge in Westerly, Rhode Island. Here is a picture of him.

He came to the U.S. when he was five and had a good public school education. As a grown man he wrote doggerel and fancied himself a naturalist. His intellectual aspirations included learning the Latin names of plants and being able to identify specimen trees that grew in the park or on the estates of the wealthy. He passed that interest on to his daughter, who in turn passed it on to my mother. My mother knew the names of a lot of New England plants and flowers, and some of her names were peculiar. My brothers and I call Evening Primrose, “June Flower,” even though I’ve never heard anyone else call it that.

On the other side of my family, my paternal great-grandfather grew up on a “farm” in what is now Hyde Park, Boston. His father was a milkman. During the Depression my grandfather, who was a stockbroker in Boston, bought a farm in New Hampshire, and that place, which was sold in the 70s, was very important to my father.

When he was 15 my father worked for a summer on a dairy farm. The men in the bunkhouse woke up at 5:00 am for the morning milking. The way they roused themselves was by smoking a cigarette in their bunk. My father started smoking that summer, and to this day the first thing he does upon waking up is reach for his cigarettes. He then takes a smoke in bed while staring at the ceiling. He just turned 87.

I tell you all this so that you know that the seeds of my current contentment were in me, planted, no doubt, by my parents and ancestors to some degree, but still unknown to me.

The Boss and I escaped the city. We live in rural New Hampshire. The towns around where I live bear more resemblance to the Hastings of my youth than the Hastings of today does. My move to the country was really an attempt to approximate the place where I was born.

While I take Robert Frost poems seriously, I don’t want you to think that I see myself as a farmer. My relationship to the land is still suburban. That said, the following inspires:

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

In that poem is the invitation that has brought much happiness to my adult life. The invitation to both the natural world and the poetry that expresses a connection to it.

I refer to the six acres we own as “the property”, but you know that it is a yard. A large suburban yard. None of the land is “working”. A yard exists to be managed, and in that management we suburbanites find some pleasure.

Whether that pleasure comes from creating, imposing, or struggling to control nature, I cannot say. All I know is that there is some satisfaction in the ordering of living things.

I am a bulked-up suburbanite. I have a pickup truck. I have a 16" chainsaw. I fell, buck, split, and stack about four cords of wood for each winter. I have been keeping bees for over a decade, and sometimes keep a flock of 10 to 12 chickens. I have built sheds, repaired stone walls, for good fences make good neighbors, and most summers I grow sunflowers, roses, tomatoes, raspberries, and herbs. I get the Johnny Seed catalog, but it doesn’t take much to remind me that I don’t know what I’m doing. Last summer I got a large birch hung up in a stand of white pines. It reminded me that delusions can get you killed.

More often than not, great happiness comes from this, my most unanticipated pleasure. I never imagined I would find such joy in puttering around the yard.

Happiness comes from walking across the lawn, dumping the old wood in the swamp, and getting rid of the buckthorn that threatens to take over a spot where lady slippers grow.

Sometimes, covered in sweat and scratches, I stand in the middle of my yard and remember that small circumstances could change everything. There is no guarantee I will ever see a decent crop of apples from the apple tree planted last year. The whole lot could turn back to forest a decade after I die. It doesn’t matter. Doing these things… cutting out a clearing, splitting wood, rearranging the stones at the edge of a garden… touches something deep and lyrical inside of me.

We have a deck, but the Boss and I often sit on the concrete steps in the front of house. She calls it the stoop. She is from Brooklyn. All of what we do is new to her. When we first moved to New Hampshire she was confused by red squirrels. She likes to say that to her, all of the garden tools just looked like props from a horror movie. She is Mrs. New England now. If you would like some tips on how to prevent powdery mildew on phlox, or the best way to make war on Japanese beetles, she could help you.

We sit on the stoop, talk about planting more daffodils, and wonder why the mountain laurels still won’t grow. There is joy in taking in the air at your door. Cultivating this small piece of land keeps us from idleness and vice.

I have no idea if my recipe for happiness can be shared. I certainly never guessed that it would be made of this, but both Frost and Voltaire pointed the way. At the end of Candide, the main character says, “but let us cultivate our garden.” The seed was there. It just had to germinate and grow.

Happiness Weekly is a glimpse into what makes each of us happy. To share your story of happiness contact Happiness Weekly or respond below.

Read Lisa Renee’s story of Happiness: Mister Crunch.