It seems as though spring may actually be here to stay, and that means a few chores await my attention. I attended to the first this morning and actually shaved my legs. Sure, I may shave them a couple of times over winter, but usually just the front. (It’s like styling my hair – I don’t generally have time to worry about the back.)
The more tedious chore that awaits me is my yard. And again, I have not worried too much about the back. Seems many of the oak leaves fell after the leaf vacuum truck was making its rounds, so now not only will we have to rake, we will also need to dispose of the leaves. Sometimes we bag them, but more often than not, we wait for a quiet time on our street and drag them by the tarp-full to vacant lot down the street. I just hope there’s some grass under them. It’s been a long, wet winter.
Next it’s time to tackle some of the garden beds. I use the term garden loosely as these are generally just filled with some seriously tenacious weeds. I go through the motions of removing them in the spring, but they always win out by May or June. These are weeds with thorns and splinter things that can make it through the toughest of garden gloves. And don’t get me started on the English ivy, which looks as though it is about to start growing inside the house. This actually happened one year when it found a passageway through a screen that was not fully closed. This stuff immediately attacks and chokes the few spring flowers that have been brave or stupid enough to pop up in our yard.
A friend recently told me that putting down mulch is like a fresh coat of paint for your yard. Unfortunately, I missed the deadline for the school fundraiser mulch sale -despite the fact that we had a sign advertising it in our front yard for weeks. So now I am dependent on my husband to pick up a few bags at a time. Sure, we could get a truck load delivered, but I long ago instituted a rule that we would never again have a truck load of anything deposited in our driveway. This dates back to the "gravel incident of 1995." After using as much gravel as we possibly could at our house, we began toting it out in small amounts like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, leaving little mysterious piles at friends’ and relatives’ houses.
I already know how this story will end. After an exasperating weekend dealing with the back yard, we will eventually decide that we really don’t use it enough to spend so much time beautifying it. Besides, the bamboo back there will eventually reach the house and we’ll no longer be able to open the back door. And isn’t this why we have a front porch?