I come home from school some Fridays, and I only want to do one thing: get the grading done for the weekend. Those Fridays are very few and infrequent. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that. In fact, I’ve been leaving my weekend grading (articles of the week, anyway) at school to work through Monday and Tuesday.

Other Fridays, I come home and help K with the cleaning. She’s always trying to get the bathrooms done Friday afternoon because she has enough work in the house Saturday that any dint will help.

Sometimes, I come home to find everyone in the backyard. I make a cup of coffee and join them.

Today, I came home and mowed. With a soccer game tomorrow and plans to remake our garden, albeit, in a new location, I knew mowing might be tricky tomorrow, so I got the mower out while K made dinner, and much to my surprise, I got it all done before dinner. Well, the front yard, anyway.

After dinner, a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up a tiller to break the ground for our new garden. The Boy chatted up the sales clerk as he tried to show me how to operate the machine, and he was ready to load the thing himself until he heard how loud it was.

“Maybe I can get the first tilling done before we head to the game in the morning,” I’d said during dinner, but when the Boy and I got back and, with a bit of help from our neighbor, got the tiller unloaded, I decided, “Why wait?”

“Hey, E, want to do some tilling?”

He dropped what he was doing and ran for his work boots.

We walked up and down the stretch of lawn by our driveway — the sunniest place on our lot except for the front yard — several times, with a couple of breaks for the Boy to empty his boots.

Once we were all done, the Boy had one request, one simple desire: “Daddy, can I run in the dirt without shoes?”

And then he stepped on a rock…