Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

At some point in the near future, I’m going to sit my 50-year-old butt in front of the TV and play video games for the entire day.

I’m going to do it with one cat on one side of me and another cat on the other side and I’m going to do so as a man suffering somewhere between maturity and immaturity.

Until I decided to take a nap, that is.

Until that time, realizing that contrary to the court of public opinion I am a fully-fledged member of adult society, I have responsibilities required by adult law that must place the concerns of a child at heart to the wayside for a little bit.

I did just that this weekend, when I went to town in the garden officially wrapping up the growing season. Plants were ripped up, grape vines were pruned back and the soil was prepped for a season of being covered with snow.

It’s a bittersweet time that comes with a little bit of reality because to be frank, I kind of gave up on the garden for the year about a month back. Thoroughly tired of the all-afternoon task of canning, I mostly just picked tomatoes when I needed them and left the rest to suffer the profound and lasting effects of plant aging.

Still, I enjoyed my time in the garden as I usually do, even if I did give up on truly finishing the process. I left a lot of fruit on the plants as well as peppers. We still have two heads of monstrous cabbage to deal with — well, one actually after what will probably turn out to be a misguided attempt this past Sunday to make kimchi.

The garden represents a lot of things for me. It represents being able to supply our home with its own vegetables, but it also represents time away from a world that continues to steadily march toward madness.

I’m not some contrarian who adopts a pessimistic view of everything because of everything. But it’s hard many days to not look at the news — something I have to do numerous times a day — and not become down because of everything going on around us.

The election is, well, complicated (shall we say) and world affairs is no less so. We have hurricanes, changing climate, pandemics, epidemics, mass shootings and drugs. And these are just the things dominating headlines.

There is so much else that we see each day to make anybody challenge their positive views on anything and everything really.

Yes, there is good news, but far too often it’s being overshadowed by the dominant bad things that are gripping headlines.

But a garden? A garden represents something akin to a nebulous expanse, even if the patch of tilled and planted soil is but a small piece of Earth like mine is.

I say nebulous, even if it’s contradictory to the space my garden occupies, because even as the world I work in constricts during my time in the “field,” the overall space of my mind expands.

Don’t worry, I’m not getting overly metaphysical or spiritual here. There will be no “Kumbaya” singing in this little space of my mind.

Rather, it’s almost an emptiness that takes over. The act of putting hoe or spade to dirt, pulling up weeds, harvesting, pruning — all of it takes over the mind and conspires to drive everything else from it.

It’s a vast nothingness that is filled with concerns only for the plant life in front of me. When I first started gardening, my mom said spoke to this, but I didn’t necessarily believe it. I’m a person that dwells on things. Second-guesses decisions and wonders near constantly if I’m doing the right thing.

Yet in the garden, and with my raspberries and our flowers out front, those sides of me that tend to obsess over things that can’t be changed are replaced by the plants themselves.

Those things are gone for the foreseeable future, which perhaps is the primary reason for my laments in this week’s column. Even though I backed away from the garden in these last few weeks, I still miss not having the option to step over that fence and go to work on the growing plants.

So rather, I’m trying something new. I’m going to start thinking about and planning some of the garden for next year. Expand maybe, consider different things to plant. Consider the whole of our lawn.

I’m particularly excited about possibly adding an apple tree in the front lawn next year.

If you would have asked me years ago if this would have become such an important part of my life, I would have said no, but life and the priorities that make up life, change over time.

My advice, find some Earth,till it up, and tend it. The work you spend in the garden far outweighs five minutes of scrolling through social media.

Granted, a stubbed toe is better than scrolling through social media.