Yard work

If you've been here before you know that our house is in the trees and that the forest is rapidly encroaching. It's gotten so overgrown that this summer I've felt overwhelmed, and, not being a gardener at all, unclear about where to start.

So on Saturday morning I was putzing inside and I heard Dave splitting wood. He and our neighbor had taken down a large pear this spring -- it was lovely but too close to the house -- and while he had chopped up some of it, he still had a lot more to split. I threw on my boots and went out to help him, and had to scold him for chopping wood in flipflops. At least he listened to me and put boots on.

We moved the firewood we had left over a bit so we make sure to burn that first when it becomes cold enough to have fires again. We had gotten a half a chord last year and used, oh, maybe. I love love love fires but they leach all the heat out of a room, so they're a real mixed bag. At any rate, we consolidated the old wood, built a new rack for the new wood so it'd be off the ground, and restacked that.

Then we had to clear an area for the canoe we're probably going to buy. So I did my best Ronald Reagan imitation and, using the loppers and Dave's fabulous Japanese pruning saw, cut back a lot of brush and chop it up. Then I dragged it back to the pile in the woods. I did this many times with lots of brush.

The thing is, once you start you see more and more and more. I cleared quite a lot in just a couple of hours and now I can see much more clearly what else to trim. We have a swing in the woods you can now see. Lily says it's not mysterious any more, but I think it still is, just farther back. I really want to make us a little yard, although what to do about all the damn pachysandra is beyond me.

Then we threw on our bathing suits, tied the borrowed canoe to the roof rack, and drove over to a bbq in Belchertown on a lake, where, as I said earlier, we paddled around. Fun.

Yesterday Dave got the bug again and went out to the front yard this time, where the rest of the pear still was, along with a couple of hemlocks that had had to come down when they were backhoeing to find our electrical break, and some pruned stuff from the Japanese maple. We spent a couple more hours on that, chopping it up small enough to put in a large leaf bag and carry or drag back to the ever-growing brush pile. I also carried about six or eight armloads of trunk and branches big enough to save to dry out and use for firewood. We stored it all near the canoe and the woodpile.

I have to say it felt great. I felt like I was at F&W again doing hard manual labor, chopping and lopping and dragging and carrying and getting grubby and dirty and sweaty and disgusting. It was great. I felt strong like bull and it is wonderful to get that stuff out of the front yard at last.