The bush out front

I'm sorry I haven't been able to catch up on my blog reading list; I promise I'll devote some serious time to it in the next day or so.

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Crazy weekend, and it went by super fast. We retired early Friday night and from Saturday afternoon until only a few hours ago Lisa and YaYa were out of the house, enjoying a slumber/birthday party for a family friend. Plus LuLu and the baby were at my Mom's and Smiley was at my in-law's, leaving the house to me and me alone.

Party!

Alas, my friends are old and decrepit and could not/would not sally forth to do anything. In retrospect the highlight of the evening was taking one of Lisa's friends across town to pay her cell phone bill.

Whoo-hoo.

But, I did get some projects done around the house, and early Sunday morn Socialist and I went and picked up a dresser Lisa's Aunt donated to LuLu. With that out of the way I borrowed a saw from him and started the next thing on the Honey-do list: the bushes out front.

Now here's the deal. When we bought the house, it had been abandoned for years and the bush in front of the porch was completely overgrown. On New Years Day of 2007 (or maybe Dec 31st, '06) I borrowed some manual hedge clippers and went to town.

These are pics of the bush midway through the effort. When I started it extended halfway into the sidewalk, forcing you to step around it when walking past.

If my memory is right, when it was done I was too tired to bother taking pictures of the end result. Here's the closest I could find to an 'after' shot.

On with the show. The bushes remained universally despised by eveyone but me. "I'd have cut them down the minute I signed the [mortgage] papers," my Dad said.

"They're awful," Lisa would say.

"I like them. I think they look like bonsai trees," I'd say.

"Yeah. If bonsai trees were five feet tall and looked like sh*t"

In time she modified her attack to point out they blocked our view of the kids when they would ride their bikes in front. It did, and that bothered me.She proposed a landscaping plan that was acceptable, and I gave in.

So fine, today I decided to take them down.

Only . .

Only I have this quirk where my conscience aches at killing a plant or tree. Yeah, yeah - I'm not a tree hugger. But put it this way: I'm all for capital punishment, but I'm not volunteering to pull the switch, you know?

So I cut down a bunch of the bush and paused, wracked with guilt. And a jogger goes by and says "Smells nice anyway." and I took a wiff and thought "huh, he's right."

It was very fragrant, almost like the cedar chests that both sets of my grandparent's used. And that got me started on how old the bush must be to be that large, that gnarled, and how it might predate my family's purchase of the house (~1940) and if left alone just might outlive us all.

And I started to think about how maybe my Mom played under it as a kid, or my Grandma stood in its shadow as my Grandpa started to woo her. And maybe it was Great-Grandpa himself that planted it, perhaps to commemorate a big event - like puchasing this house - or as an anniversary gift to my Great-Grandma. Maybe the day it was planted was a big deal.

Or maybe it was just an ugly bush that came with the house and eveyone ignored it for decades.

Either way I stopped, took a step back, and came up with a plan.

An hour or so later Lisa returned and saw me moving branches to the trash. With excitement in her voice she asked if the bush was gone. "Sort of," I said, and took her out front.

"See, it opens up the whole front of the porch. You can see the sidewalk from the rocking chairs, I checked. And it'll bookend that shepard's crook you wanted. And I defy you to tell me they don't look like bonsai now"

She paused. "Dude." That's all she said . . but it said so much.

Sadly, subsequent opinions, voiced by others, also lean towards chopping the thing down.

Dangit, I really do like it. And once I lay some sod, put that shepards crook up, and maybe a small birdfeeder or a stone with our family name on it, I think it'll rock.

Or I can just borrow the saw again.

Tags: blogplugs