At the risk of waxing poetic, I caught myself thinking this week where I would be if not for the light of the moon. 

I was thinking not merely about the things I could take for granted, but more specifically about the things I can’t get done until the setting of the sun. 

With two young boys, the assumption is that I could just get them to help; however, that’s not always the case. Both are under the age of five, so to coordinate their efforts for a productive but much less efficient achievement of tasks would be something competitively akin to herding cats. I love them; they just aren’t there yet. 

It really has nothing to do with them anyway. The number of things on the Hill household plate is staggering at times, barely allowing for mealtimes, let alone the time and patience needed to propagate early skills.

We’ve taken to getting home and doing dinner however possible, perhaps doing some dishes or laundry, then getting the kids to sleep before tackling our outstanding projects. 

So the proverbial start of our second shift has been clocking in at around 9:30 or 10 p.m. We wash eggs, sort vegetables, feed chickens, plant new seeds in the basement, or take on any of the other chores that don’t fit into the rest of our schedule.  

This week alone, I don’t think we got to bed earlier than midnight on any given day, only to wake up around 5:30 to 6 a.m. and get after it again. 

After the last few weeks, we’ve accumulated a number of plant starts that have begun to demand they be planted in the ground instead of remaining in limbo, i.e. our porch. So with the kids in bed and the truck lights flooding, we took to the completion of our home herb garden. 

I call it an herb garden; however, it ended up holding everything from kale to cabbage to cauliflower to dill and a handful of other similar things. All said, it was about 200 square feet to which I had previously tilled and added fresh compost. 

Prior to transplanting that evening, we stretched out our plastic mulch cover and finished a complete drip tape irrigation system. With the infrastructure in place, my wife began bringing plants over from the porch. We cut spaces for them, popped them out of their containers, and laid them out along each row. 

As I did most of this, she would come along and set them in the ground, switching with me every so often to save our backs, which were both pretty shot by the end of the planting. 

As it was now pushing about 1:30 in the morning, we threw our containers in a pile in the corner of the garden fence and called it a night. Admittedly I was getting nervous about how long my truck lights would last before I started tanking the battery. Fortunately, it started right up as I moved it back to the driveway at the conclusion of our yard work. 

We staggered inside, fell in bed, and proceeded to get a restful four hours before it was time to get up for work. 

I say “work” with the inflection of Dr. Seuss. Just as he had Thing One and Thing Two, my wife and I have Work One and Work Two. Don’t ask me which is which; they both make me juggle as the cat did with the fish. 

If I were looking for more work to bury myself in, perhaps I could start a business called Gardens by Morning, doing overnight garden installations. Wouldn’t that be quite the birthday gift for somebody? 

The way out here if it doesn’t get done by the time the sun sets, then the workday hasn’t finished, even if that workday takes in a bit of the next one. I talk a lot about how hard I work, but make no mistake, I have a wife who puts everything I do to shame. My favorite part of it all is being able to do parts of it right next to her, even if only by the light of the moon.