How does your garden grow?

A while back I asked for some advice on making use of the little courtyard in front of our house. I think the best advice we got was just to dive in and try some stuff, and not to worry too much about not doing it perfectly. We put a bunch of plants in the ground in the first week of May, without doing a lot of planning or research. And so far, most things seem to be doing pretty well: ( read more, and see pics )

I'm really enjoying this. When you have one of the only front yards in the neighborhood, there is a certain amount of social pressure to make it look good, and a certain pleasure and pride in succeeding. But it also just makes me happy to walk in the gate into our lovely little oasis of color and fragrance. A fresh herbal scent hangs over everything. It's fun to watch the vegetables grow, and look for little changes from day to day.

Michael and I are thinking of signing up for a City Farm next year, if I don't get pregnant. For $20, we can get a 150-square-foot garden plot in a city park plus tools to borrow and all the water, leaf mulch, and wood chips we can use. I'd love to be able to have enough sunlight and lead-free soil to really grow things. But this isn't too bad, for a start.

They'll take away my liberal card for this.

So, we did this thing. Which doesn't seem like the kind of thing we would do. We joined a "Swim and Tennis Club."

It's about a block and a half away from Alex's nursery school - a ten-minute walk from our house. The three and four year olds at school make use of the playground in any kind of half-decent weather, and in the summer they play in the pool twice a week and have swimming lessons. When she's four, she'll get tennis lessons too. Because the nursery school students make such extensive use of the club grounds, families of three- and four-year-old full-day students are required to join the club. The school covers our membership bond, and we pay annual dues. Which are expensive.

The mother of one of Alex's friends, who is a lawyer married to an architect, waxed enthusiastic about how the club is like a big family, and how pleasant it is on summer evenings when everyone brings their dinner to the pool and the adults socialize while the children play. This made me nervous. It made it sound more like joining a country club than paying a nursery school playground supplement. I don't really think of myself as the sort of person who would get along, or be accepted, in a country club setting.

The e-mails I got from the club in the lead-up to pool season - for example, suggesting that I sign up for a "tennis ladder," the rungs of which I could move up or down by challenging other members - didn't help. I developed a serious case of social anxiety about the damn Swim and Tennis Club.

"I think you're overthinking this," Michael said tactfully. It didn't help. But fortunately he turned out to be right.

We went for the first time on Monday. Once you're actually inside the intimidatingly high brick wall, it seems more like a normal kind of place that you might want to go. There's a decent-sized swimming pool, an extremely faded and downmarket cement-block building housing changing rooms, bathrooms, and showers, a bunch of lounge chairs, an outdoor poolside eating area, and a separately-fenced toddler pool. There are tennis courts, which I ignored. Then there's an open stretch of grass with a picnic area (complete with grills) at one end, a climbing structure for kids, and a sandbox. They have a swim team for kids 5 and up and offer swimming and tennis lessons. There's an ice machine, refrigerator, and microwave, instead of a bar or restaurant.

In a suburb, this would be a public park facility. There's nothing overtly country-clubby about it except, well, um, the membership dues, the membership bond, the tennis ladder, the annual crab feast, the fact that you can bring alcohol to your picnics, and the numerically restricted membership. We saw several of Alex's classmates' families and one family from our church.

I felt a bit better once I checked off two of the things on my secret checklist: African-Americans (some, but not a majority), and women as fat or fatter than me wearing bathing suits. I still feel kind of weird about being members there, though.

( pictures of the club under the cut )