A Day in the Country

I always overreach. Eternal optimist that I am, my “to do” list is always a bit—ha,ha!!—unrealistic, my calendar a bit too crammed, my good intentions a few too many. A guy I dated a few times last year once said he thought a major difference between us (as if our origins in Mars and Venus weren’t enough) was that if I had enough time in a day to do three things, I’d schedule five. And if he had enough time to do five things, he’d schedule three. He was unfailingly on time or early. I was always running just a wee bit late. We didn’t go the distance.

I should have remembered that yesterday, but the sun was shining and it was a snow-less fifty degrees in the dead of winter, and the yard work I thought I wouldn’t get to until next May beckoned seductively. This was no small job, not a matter of pulling a few extra weeds out of a flower bed sooner rather than later. This was Woman vs. Nature, a pitched, pivotal battle against forest succession. I live on fifteen acres way out in the country, and not a lick of serious yard maintenance had been done since my ex-husband and I had separated nearly two years before. There had been a lot to do in that time, with vacations and job crises and assorted family emergencies and an old horse that took up way more of my time last summer than I expected when I’d gotten her twenty something years earlier. The boys had admirably picked up the slack in cutting the acre of lawn that surrounded the house, and which was all in turn still surrounded by forest. From a distance you’d look at the place and think, hey, it’s still inhabited by regular folks, not Norman Bates and his mother.

But there were small details left unattended, and saplings and brush had sprouted and flourished in the most inconvenient places. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the space of the past two years, five-foot trees had sprung from the flower bed surrounding the basketball hoop, as well as out of the right angle created by the flat surface of the driveway and the railroad ties stacked around it.

A year ago these trees would have been small and scraggly, just a handful to pull out. They were settled in like flint now, however, and the job required a hoe, a rake, two pruning shears of various severity, a shovel, a whole bunch of digging, and a couple of hand saws. And those were the “friendly” trees, the ones that didn’t fight back. The eight-footer than had staked its claim to sun and earth only a foot from the well could have come straight from the impenetrable briar patch surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle. Thick, long, wicked thorns on every branch as well as all up and down the trunk. This was not a job for the faint of heart. Or someone without a plan and some serious gardening gloves.

The trees eventually fell, one by one, creating a tangled pile of wood in the driveway. With every one of the jobs I’ve tackled and changes I’ve made around the house since the divorce—from learning to change the light bulb in the garage door mechanism, to getting the driveway paved after twenty years of bumping over ruts and potholes, to personally sawing down the huge bushes in front of the house before a contractor could put stone facing up around the place, I’ve stood back and thought, “hey, I did it!” Same thing yesterday. Despite the ache in my shoulders and the mud on my knees and my butt, I eventually stood back and saw…no trees where I wanted to see…no trees. I should have stopped there. Of course I didn’t.

Once the offending saplings were gone, I looked around and got a better view of the patch of wild raspberries that had sprung up and flourished at the corner of the garage. I had known for a while that they were getting serious. This was the corner where I parked the garbage bin out of the way until it was time to roll it a block down the driveway for the weekly trash pickup. And lately it seemed like there were more and more scratchy tendrils trying to encircle that big plastic bin and its wheels and keep me from hauling it away. With an hour of daylight left, I started in on the berry bushes.

They were like something out of “Little Shop of Horrors.” They wound around the downspout of the rain gutter. They spread themselves across the garage siding. They wove their way through dead weeds and grass, and through other branches of other bushes. I’d had no idea before then that not only did they spring out of the ground at their roots, every one of those spiky red ropes also dug themselves into the ground elsewhere with another half dozen snaky little tendrils. I’d yank on a branch that I thought was cut free, only to find myself off balance and ensnared by more bristling, limber red canes, hearing them slide with a sinister hiss across my canvas jacket or snagging my sweatpants. I got halfway through the project—enough to keep my garbage bin from being overrun—when I finally gave up. Despite the jacket and gardening gloves I’d worn, my forearms still looked like I’d been wrestling with a mountain lion. I was so tired at that point I could hardly stand up. But as I looked at the fruits of my efforts, I still felt really good.

That was yesterday. Today I’ve been walking around in so much pain that I could hardly move past a hobble. I’ve been thinking all day about Tim, the guy who laughed and told me I tried to do too much. And just for today, I’d probably agree with him. But I know the sore muscles will only last so long as a reminder. And then I’m sure I’ll be off and running again. And you know, I like it that way.