For the last couple of weeks I have been doing yard-work.  Yeah, go ahead laugh.  I have been weeding and planting, and replacing shrubs and doing all the crap work that needs to be done on a much more regular basis.  Since I hate gardening, it goes way too long without being done and then I have to work three times as hard to get things taken care of.

Well, for the past several years we have had The Yardman doing the lawn.  That is truly the name of his business.  The Yardman.  I called him Forrest because he sounded just like Tom Hanks when he was Forrest Gump.  He was a pleasant, slow talker, with a definite Carolinian drawl, and he was not speedy about getting things taken care of.  Additionally, he usually wouldn’t come for days after he said he would (if he did at all).  He also had a rag tag couple of guys helping him.  One may have been his son, but he looked like he was a very old dwarf.  He never seemed to be in school, and he just kind of hung around doing nothing.  The other was Otis Campbell from the Andy Griffith show.  Now I can’t tell you for sure that he was a drinker.  I never smelled it on him, but he looked like Otis and he walked with a hitch in his git-along and he seemed to have about as much on the ball as the dwarf.  Needless to say, Forrest spent 75% of the time he worked on our yard giving instructions to the two “helpers.”

Okay, so my point, and I do have one, is that my yard was neglected.  While Forrest was perfectly willing to  poor Round-up or whatever on the weeds, he never seemed to pull them.  Looking at mounds of dead dandelions hanging out in my grass wasn’t the lush green yard I wanted.  He really wanted to mow and plant and forget about weeding.  Well so did I, but I had hired him to take care of it.  Eventually we parted ways, because he didn’t want me to buy my own plants, and he got them from the same greenhouse I did.  So why pay more?  I’ll tell you why…because your muscles don’t hurt if you hire a gardener.  I also have ruined a perfectly decent manicure.    I have six flower beds between the front yard and the backyard.  The beds have been ignored so long we are taking them apart and re-lining them and then adding fresh mulch.  Underneath the existing weeds, worms, and undergrowth there is landscape fabric which is supposed to discourage weed growth.  BS!  I think our weeds think this is fertilizer or grade A compost, because they have flocked to this nappy black paper like gulls on a seaside picnic!  I thought I would pull it up easily and most of the weeds with it, since they aren’t supposed to penetrate the fabric….yeah, that didn’t happen.  It was ridiculous.  It reminded me of when Pooh got stuck in the tree.  I was holding on to fabric and my daughter was holding on to me and we still couldn’t get it all out.  We finally had to relent and use scissors to cut around some of the worst of the roots.

I wish the flowers that I have planted can acquire roots half as hearty as the roots on the weeds I have pulled out of the flower beds.  Then the rental property that borders us in the backyard apparently hated my honeysuckle that I have been trying to vine all along the fence back there.  I say that because they poured some type of weed killer or something on it and caused it to fall into the yard, rather than stay vined up on the fence as I had been working for.  This greatly shortened the length of the backyard.  So…and keep in mind my great fear of snakes…I cleared the dead vines from underneath the honeysuckle and raked out the compost that had compiled there.  Of course, my daughter helped.  She tacked the honeysuckle back in place as well, but every time a vine brushed my legs I nearly had a run away!  Boppy has already killed one snake back there, and I am still amazed that we didn’t come across one in all of that mess.

It is almost done.  We have little piles of dead leaves, vines, and bushes that will need to be put in the lawn bags for the compost truck to pick up on Tuesday. If we get it done by Tuesday.  Today when I woke up there were parts of my body screaming for mercy that I didn’t even know had been in the fight.  I didn’t even know your hair could hurt!  I was telling my daughter that what with all the rain and mess perhaps today would be a good day to take off.  She said, “Thank God, I was so sore when I got up this morning, and I forgot at first what I had done to be sore about.”  That made me feel better…you know misery loves company.  Plus, she’s only twenty-three so if it’s kicking her ass, I have a lot less to feel bad about.  I think…no I know that my imagination runs rampant at times.  I set up scenarios and then anticipate their occurrence.  Well, there is a part of me that thinks I am doing all of this so The Yardman will feel ashamed when he drives by.  Look what two chicks can do (at far less than he charged) with a few cheap tools and a lot of time.  Of course, he probably doesn’t drive by.  And if he does he probably is so busy trying to keep his staff under control he doesn’t have time to look up, but in my world…he sees the beauty of a well maintained yard with pristine flower beds and he weeps a little that he could never achieve such perfection. 

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