I spent a couple of hours Saturday puttering in the yard. Puttering may be a lost art in these fast, scheduled, output-oriented days, but I highly recommend it.
The Cambridge dictionary defines puttering as: “To do things in a relaxed way, without rushing or trying very hard.” I agree with that, and would add that puttering in the yard means there are no power tools and no specific outcomes required.
When puttering, you usually don’t complete one entire task, such as clearing out a bed. Instead you do a lot of small tasks all over that none-the-less are productive and bring satisfaction. My puttering included: removing volunteer tree seedlings and vines, dusting fire ant mounds, trimming cannas that had fallen over, pulling nut grass out of the gravel path and Bermuda out of the beds, and raking up the sunburned remains of lamb’s ear.
You know you’re puttering correctly when you’ve taken some trimmings from a bed to the brush pile, stop to hand pull an unwanted vine you just noticed, and spend the next 15 minutes crouched in that bed. Or you reach for a hand tool and realize you left it at the previous task.
When puttering on a hot day, you tend to follow the shade. If shade is hard to find, you take a break at the picnic table for water and to check your messages. And while noticing you failed to protect your arms with sunscreen, you endure the taunts of a mockingbird in the tree above you.
While puttering, it’s a good time to look up at the exterior of the house and make mental notes of things you need to do. After 14 years at our place, it’s time for a power wash to clean away the dust and knock down some old wasp and dirt dauber nests. That may lead to a decision about painting or at least some touchups, tasks that you definitely can’t putter at.
A puttering session usually lasts just a couple of hours. It ends for a variety of reasons, including when the coolish early fall day suddenly becomes summertime hot again. Or when the neighbor shouting at his son or the groan of construction down the street breaks the gentleness of the day.
The yard isn’t the only place you can putter. You can putter at the office catching up on correspondence and filing papers. I’m basically puttering when I’m at my desk sorting through papers and gathering notes scribbled here and there about future projects. That will be real work eventually, but puttering helps me get organized.
I don’t know if puttering is genetic, but my maternal grandparents would putter in the garden during the day and in the kitchen until the wee hours of the morning. They’d put us kids down on the hide-a-bed in the adjoining room and expect us to go to sleep while they clanked around in the kitchen. And when they were done there, they’d putter on the other side of us while they got ready for bed.
Sometimes when I get stuck in my writing, I’ll putter with something else, such as tinkering with the works of an old table clock I foolishly thought I could fix. A better choice is to lean over a jigsaw puzzle for a while or go outside and putter there. Puttering outside seems to stimulate the imagination.
I don’t think the Bible says anything definite about puttering. We read that God rested after creating everything, and from the unusual appearance of some of the animals, birds and plants, I believe God might have spent some time puttering.