Not Instagram worthy, my world is “good enough”

Water feature with tomatoes in background

My world is more “good enough” than it is airbrushed Instagram. While I love scrolling through endless photos and reels of perfect gardens, beautifully presented food, and well behaved canoe-riding cats, I live in unremarkable ordinariness, with just-in-time cooked meals and a cat who thinks nothing of waking me during the night for food that she then rejects in silent indignation. C'est la vie in my world. 

I learned about ‘good enough’ from my father, whose middle name could have been ‘bodge up’. I can still hear him suggesting to my mother that whatever home repair he had just completed was surely good enough, followed by my mother’s long suffering sigh of acceptance — either of Dad’s quality of work or her need to do it better, do it right, herself. Good enough is an art unto itself, interpreted by each practitioner in their own way. In my world, good enough is neither bodge up nor perfection; it is a finished and functional whatever in the time available with what I have to hand.

An example is the corner of our backyard that serves as the potting area. The yard is very small, quite narrow, and, after 25 years of us tinkering with various layouts and permutations of component parts, pretty much at capacity. But every gardener needs ready access to pots and soil for planting and then, of course, the inevitable transplanting of precious annuals or perennials. No room for a gorgeous potting table from Lee Valley. Instead, I took a leaf out of my ingenious friend Barbara’s own back yard — not huge, full to bursting with lovely plantings and no room for a shed to store tools. Her solution? A large tall-standing planter that acts as her shed; it stands beside the patio as not only a spot of beauty but a handy and practical receptacle for all manner of necessary gardening items. Inventive and effective.

My own solution is maybe not so beautiful but it arises from the same need to be creative in a small space: I hauled over the plastic wood barrel lookalike, plunked the bag of potting soil into it, set the old blue recycling box on its side beside it to hold pots and — voilà, a mini potting area that is accessible, effective and definitely good enough.

These kind of creative solutions have a lot to do with having the eye to see beyond the object that is obviously in front of you and to seeing its transformation into something quite other. The easier solution might be to throw some money at the problem, to order online and to have the perfect whatever delivered to your door. But where is the fun in that?

One day not long ago, while scrolling online, I landed on the reel of a woman who seemed to be a full-time thrifter. Before I knew it, the internet’s algorithm was feeding me reels showing thrift shop finds turned into beautiful objets d’art. Ah, I thought. There it is again: the eye that sees beyond what is on the shelf to something quite other. So, I took myself to a local thrift shop to see if I could find something (what?) that would hold a lovely Japanese-style porcelain ball that I had picked up at a local art sale. With the right something to sit on, it would look lovely tucked beneath a shrub in the front yard — or set onto a clay saucer as a water feature for birds in the back yard.

I wandered up and down the aisles, looking and looking beyond what was displayed. Suddenly, in the candle section, I saw a short cast iron green-painted stand with a slightly concave top that would perfectly hold the ball (top photo). Success, accompanied by a lovely sense of creative problem-solving.

The world out there is so far from perfect that, maybe, it is little wonder that we yearn for the airbrushed perfection sold to us online these days. But that is illusion, we know this. What is real is Barbara’s planter-turned-shed and my cobbled together potting table. No one can take away our creativity, our ingenuity or, indeed, the pleasure we feel from finding a solution far from any commercial marketplace. And that is far more than good enough; that is perfection of its own kind.

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International holiday note

Dear Canadian readers: Happy Canada Day July 1st! 
Dear American readers: Happy Independence Day July 4th! 
I thank each of you — and every reader from everywhere — for crossing any and all borders to find me and my words here. It means the world to me. 
Love, 

Amanda 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.