yardwork

Never-ending creep

by

I don’t like lawns. I don’t want one but I also don’t want to deal with the city’s nagging about the state of mine so until a viable alternative is ready, we have an uneasy truce wherein I make things look presentable, and they leave me alone.

This year my solution started to take shape. Mow the easement and intentional looking paths and let the rest go. The results have been delightful and informative. We have beautiful areas of wavy grass and tall things growing everywhere in what looks like an intentionally contained way. They’ve also given me both clarity and a way forward in addressing my creeping Charlie.

First, I don’t actually dislike the Charlie. It’s good for bees in the spring and has a lovely green clover shape. The fact that it chokes out the grass bothers me less than the fact it chokes out other things I might want there. So ultimately it will have to go. This is a process that will likely take me until I’m gone. Increasingly, I’m ok with that.

I’ve changed my perspective on weeding over the years. It’s something that I feel comes with age and, more importantly, wisdom. Similar to birding in its never ending serenity. Different in that it has both an effect on the world around me, and a resulting demonstration of work completed. The dopamine is real when weeding is done right. The fact that they will and do always come back is unimportant in the moment, but vital.

Weeding is a simple conversation I can have with my environment again and again; never the exact same, but never wildly different. Predictable but varied, in any duration.

Weeding has become a meditation for me.

But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people’s idea, not nature’s

Anonymous

I mowed over some ground bees today.

by

So of course I decided today—right now is the time to start a new blog. I blame a higher-than-is-wise dose of Benadryl. Also, it’s Sunday.

I’m not even sure ground bees is what they’re called to be honest, but their classification seemed really unimportant as I sprinted away from the lawn mower, even less so now as I’m typing and could easily look them up and provide actual, valid information.

That would set a standard for this site I’m not willing to commit to (yet).

But I’ve been wanting to get back into casual writing and since the yard work was halted on account of the insect muggers, here I am.

I won’t tell you to expect thoughts on family, marriage, fatherhood, music, leadership, work, accessibility, baseball, technology, or life. My track record for new blogs has been abysmal in the last twenty years. It’s even money that this will be my only substantive contribution.

Still. I like to think that I’ve reached the level of maturity and discipline (and wisdom and knowledge) to deliver something worth reading on a semi-regular bases. I’ve certainly started proof reading before hitting publish which is a previously unattained level of refinement, so there is hope.

Until later -🦉

P.S. Immense gratitude to my friend and colleague Tyler Hall for the website home.

P.P.S. Since I don’t have footnotes set up here yet, pretend the Sunday reference in paragraph one links here to elaborate with the following:

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

Douglas Adams