A back yard we long to share

I stood at the deck railing, leaning with my palms on the top rail, and looked out over the back yard, thinking of all the work my wife and I had poured into that space — whole weekend days in the heat of summer and in autumn's cool breezes. The yard would never be described as "manicured." The lawn contains more weeds than grass. Volunteer briers and seedlings pop up out of the natural areas. The shrubs need pruning again. The mulch is thin in spots.

But it has been our project, and because we are not perfectionists (at least, I'm not), it is satisfying to look over this little expanse of lawn and mulch and trees and shrubs and to think, like God at the creation, "it is good."

Eleven years we have been in this house, and the house, like the yard, is an unfinished project and always will be. The satisfaction of that moment at the deck rail dissolved into melancholy at the thought of all the work that lies ahead of us and the length of our "to do" list.

And I thought of this: Of how I would like to show this yard, with all its imperfections, to all those who never saw it. My parents, who were in a nursing home when we uprooted ourselves and moved across town to this larger house on a larger lot, never visited us here. We told them about our move and showed them pictures that they seemed not to comprehend. We came home to this yard from their funerals. My brother Bill, who had assisted me in repairs to our previous home, never saw this one. And we never saw the house he lived in when he died so unexpectedly. Brother Larry, who once spent the night with us in a house we were renting years ago, never visited this house, though the invitation remains open.

I had trailed after my older brothers, always reaching milestones years after theirs — graduation, marriage, children, grandchildren, homes. This back yard is not a place for showing, "Look what I've finally done," but a place for sharing, a place to sit and relax and watch the sun set behind the trees as the sky grows dim. That is a satisfaction I long to share.

Getting older reaches its reward

This is retirement day for my older brother, who becomes the first of us to fully retire. My other brother took a buyout from a former employer but was back at work in a new career the next day. His retirement is on semi-permanent hold. And I, of course, have been involuntarily "retired" for about six months now (and am eager to be fully employed and productive once again).

Having two older brothers, I realized the other day, is what made me so eager, from a very early age, long to be older. When I was 5 years old, I wanted to be older — bigger — like my brothers to play football and baseball with them and their friends. When they became teenagers in the 1950s and emulated the rebellious, independent, impudent, disrespectful attitudes of James Dean and Elvis Presley, I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be "cool," to use a slang term of the era. Singer/songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, in her "Only a Dream" poignantly tells of the bond between younger and older siblings.

Later, as they embarked on careers and marriages, I envied their income and their escape from what seemed to me to be the mundane existence we had shared as children. As I struggled with small children and the expenses of maintaining a household, I envied the relative freedom of older children and maturing careers.

I finally put aside my eagerness to be older when the infirmities of age began taking a toll on my brothers and the realities of rearing teenagers made having small children seem comparatively tame. Crossing a threshold around age 30, I found my metabolism slowing down, my stamina diminishing, my weight increasing, my skin beginning to sag and my joints aching. Suddenly, being older didn't seem so enticing.

In recent years, I've envied some peers who have completed careers in law enforcement, teaching or other vocations that provide early retirement. "When we retire ... " became a catch-phrase for our household conversations. We would travel, learn to play music, do crosswords, read all those books we had set aside, visit the grandchildren, volunteer more and ... you name it. But these past six months, while I've been a statistic among the millions of recently laid off American workers, I've done relatively few of the things I had envisioned for when I had the time. As in most "grass is greener" scenarios, the reality doesn't measure up to the dream. And the anxieties of job-hunting in this market have deflated whatever enjoyment I could muster.

Congratulations are in order this retirement day, but not envy. I'm not eager, at long last, to be as old as my brothers as we've reached the point when age is better measured in generations than in years and time is no longer on our side.