The Way You Do Anything is the Way You Do Everything

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The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

It is summer. The garden is a jungle.

Various squash plants (at this point I couldn’t even tell you what kind) are pouring over the edges of my barely-kempt garden beds. The trellises are dense with a forest of peas and beans.

Our new morning routine includes filling two toddler-size buckets with blackberries. My hands will be stained purple for the next three months.

In the evenings, I prune the plum trees and leave the trimmings out for the deer. They love plum leaves. We know two by name — Ear Mama with the bad ear and Leg Baby with the bad leg. One found its way into my workshed the other night to munch on the onions I’d harvested and laid out to dry.

The afternoons are warm. After school, we spend an hour splashing in the creek, or running with our dog Emmy through the tall grass, or riding bikes under the redwoods.

I wait patiently each day for the fog to burn off, for the joy of opening the top half of our kitchen Dutch door, which we lovingly salvaged, adapted, and installed.

We talk at length and with enthusiasm about all the projects we will complete this summer — a big stone wall to extend the garden, a little detached dining room off the kitchen with lots of windows to give us a place to sit with more than three, finally launching our sailboat into Tomales Bay — knowing full well how little we’ll actually get done.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

I might write ten emails exploring this saying before I’m done with it. A few people I’ve said it to looked genuinely terrified, but I find it comforting.

A disheveled garden I step into with love. A “thank you” to the blackberry bushes for reminding us it’s summer. My elbows pressing into the bottom half of that kitchen door, looking out at this place we’re lucky to call home.

My schedule tends to be light when the kids are out of school, but not this year. I’m photographing more summer weddings and engagements (know anyone getting married? I officially do weddings now).

I didn’t attempt to ski Shasta this spring. I haven’t been backpacking out of Kings Canyon this summer. No river trips on the Kern, no long days of surf up the coast.

This year it’s blackberries, fog burning off, a deer named Ear Mama, the simple things close to home.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

– David