Husband and I hate yard work so much that we took pains to buy one of the only houses in town without a lawn. Even so, there is still a troublesome border sprouting weeds along three sides of the house. Once a year, my mother pulls all the weeds and puts mulch down, but they always grow back. She must be doing it wrong.

This year, a rather purposeful-looking plant sprouted right next to the back door. “Weed or not?” I wondered, and then one day it threw up a large, pretty yellow flower. My parents cleaned out the border to give it some room to grow, put down more mulch, and then put up some edging so we would stop treading on it. Other plants of the same type took root and fluorished, but we still had no idea what it was.

One day our babysitter was dropping off the boys and exclaimed, “You’re growing pumpkins? How did you get them to take? Mine have never turned out so well.”

Pumpkins?!

Rewind to Halloween, when like most of our neighbors we (nominally) decorated our doorstops with pumpkins. Unlike most of our neighbors, though, we pretty much let the pumpkins sit out and rot until it snowed and we didn’t have to think about them anymore. The seeds must have dropped into the soil, and then Nature took its course.

There are some benefits to sloth.