After umpteen million years of living next door to the Burkes, they died and last summer some nice new young neighbors moved in. I don’t think they are pregnant but, other than that, my brain has been busily doing the math: *we* were about their age when we moved in next door to the Burkes and they were not too much older then than we are now. Or maybe not older at all. Yikes. Anyway. One of the first things the new neighbors did was rip out the old bushes in front of the Burkes’ house. Some people around here were a little horrified! How *dare* they? Those bushes have been there since… Well, I don’t know how long but definitely since you could just head down to Schlenker’s Hardware Store and buy your darn dynamite (but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Me? I cheered when they ripped out those old bushes. We loved having the Burkes next door but let’s face it, they are not around any more. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with moving into a new house and making it your own space. And that includes the yard. Did weeeeeeee do that when weeeeeee moved in to our house? Well, not really so much. I am *still* struggling with the Landfill Chitchen Reno Prodject (intentionally misspelled).

But I’m not talking about the Landfill interior right now because it is spring and that means it is gardening time and everybody is out digging and weeding and planting things. Our yard? It has hardly changed since we moved in. We have bushes that the Wrights (or whoever came before them) planted in front of the house and in the back of the house and we have this long strip of garden at the back of the yard where some crocuses and daffodils and tiger lilies still come up every year. Those things are older than my kids. The rest of that space is a wasteland of weeds and a few wayward lilies of the valley that tried to overtake the yard once. Oh, and poison ivy. I think. I haven’t positively identified any of that yet this year. It is one of the few plants I CAN identify because it is just about the only thing in the world that I seem to be highly sensitive to.

I WANT to be able to blithely rip out old, scraggly bushes and dig holes and plant new things all over my yard. Alas, I have a black thumb. Or maybe it isn’t exactly that. I occasionally get all excited and do a bunch of weeding and planting at the beginning of the summer. That requires a gargantuan effort because I don’t know what tools to use and/or find them and by the end of the whole thing, I am mentally exhausted. And then I get busy. I am at work and in and out of town and I forget to water things or I can’t find the right kind of hose attachment or I can’t make the hose reach all the way to the stuff I want to water and it all comes to a bad end and at the end of the summer, our yard is still a big weed-infested, scraggly old bush mess. In the fall, I rake/blow the leaves (I admit that the GG has done that the last couple years) and the yard looks pretty good at that point and everything is put away nicely and I have high hopes for the next summer and then it all just repeats itself.

As I watched my new young neighbors planting flowers where those scraggly old bushes were, I felt defeated. I thought that if I just earned a little more money, I could hire a gardener. But I really kind of WANT to be able to do my own garden. Maybe what I really need is a coach. A gardening coach. Does that kind of person exist? I wonder how much they would charge for their services. I wonder if I could find someone who would work WITH me and not try to bowl me over.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.