As it turns out, springtime keeps you busy once you live in a house instead of an apartment.
Last year at this time, I was paying flying visits to our newly-acquired property, which was then in the hands of the contractors. There was an overflowing dumpster in the driveway. Next to it was an assortment of broken-down crap the prior owners had discarded in their mad flight from winter snows and dunning notices. Did I happen to mention that they left owing the heating oil company nearly $2,000? There was an enormous TV with a kicked-in screen, a broken-down five-drawer file cabinet, quite a lot of cheap Christmas outdoor decoration with frazzled ends and burnt-out bulbs, and a phenomenally ugly waterlogged wagon-wheel chandelier that would have fit right into the saloon scene of Destry Rides Again. In short, it looked like a tchotchke-mad branch of the Joad clan had recently left in something of a hurry.
The grounds themselves were in a similar state of pristine neglect. A cursory trip around the perimeter with some heavy-duty Hefty bags and a thick pair of gloves turned up a bountiful cache of discarded vodka bottles, beer cans (somebody was partial to Bud Lite), lots of broken glass (the perfect thing to insure spending large sums - originally earmarked for cleaning out the neglected gutters - at the vet's after you move in with a dog who likes to chase squirrels through the underbrush), half a crack pipe, a syringe (I, of course, am making no speculations as to the provenance of these artifacts, and they may well have been here since Colonial days) and, most curious of all, the Graveyard of Discarded Tools. These were not small implements like hammers and screwdrivers. Somewhere, somehow, somebody had tired of at least 30 assorted pickaxes, shovels, wrenches, spanners, lengths of rusty chain, and a lot of other serious construction equipment type stuff I don't even know the name of and had dumped them into the underbrush next to the driveway and kicked a bit of dirt over them. After briefly toying with the idea of taking them over to where the new Tappan Zee Bridge is under construction and seeing whether anybody could use them, I reluctantly decided they were too rusty and persuaded our longsuffering private sanitation engineer Stacey to take them away. (Private road = Pay somebody to come take away your garbage twice a week. In the beginning, we were getting more than what we paid for. A lot more. Stacey was a peach about it, I have to say, although he did some eye-rolling after we left the pull-chain toilet on the stump for his disgruntled attention.)
By the time I'd cleared out all the garbage, it was winter and all I wanted to do was hibernate. I did manage to plant 100 daffodil bulbs before the ground froze and I collapsed, and to my amazement and delight, most of them seem to have come up. (I haven't counted, but they're in all the right places and look very pretty and bloomy and Spring-like.)
March brought wind. Lots of wind. We would lie drowsily in bed hearing the gale moaning through the trees and sleepily murmur that one of these days we should probably do something about cutting down all those dead branches on all those neglected trees before something happened.
Then, of course, something happened. One-half of one of those dead trees fell down, smack-dab across the roof of the Honda CRV. Bye-bye, Honda CRV.
Fortunately, nobody was in it or near it. Fortunately, we had insurance. Fortunately, the book value of the Honda covered not only a replacement car (we now have a used Accura, and I am still figuring out how things like the windshield wipers and the CD player work) but some of the cost of belatedly hiring the Tree Guy to take down the most egregious threats to life, home and automobiles. The three hulking dead trees all the way at the rear of the property still loom tall and proud, and I hope they won't fall on me while I am absentmindedly wandering around near the stream some day, but at least they're not hanging over our roof.
After the threat of Heavily Ironic Death By Killer Tree During Loving Attempts to Minister to Mother Earth had been more or less resolved and a ton of previously impassable wood had been cleared away, I was finally able to see what was going on alongside the driveway, drag out more bags of rubbish, and get down to the seemingly endless task of raking away thirty years' worth of sodden dead leaves and dumping them into the woods. My bisters are healing nicely; thank you for asking.
So finally I'm at the fun part, which is, of course, the part where I visit plant nurseries, load up my cart with jewel-toned magnificence in bloom and then put back more than half of it after remembering that we have way too much shade for most of these plants to thrive in, and anyway the deer think everything is salad.
I also bought a big bag of manure. I never thought I'd be paying for cow shit, but it seems you're never safe from being surprised until you're dead. Did you know there's sales tax on cow shit?
Last week my local library celebrated Arbor Day by handing out red maple saplings to residents with library cards. Mine is presently about a foot tall and living in a large planter tub the Joads abandoned in their flight; it will eventually be planted in the ground and go leaping towards its full growth (60'-80' tall with a 60' canopy) after I get the dead trees by the stream taken down.
The reward, of course, is that every morning I wake up and something new and beautiful is now in place of what was formerly slovenliness and rubbish. The former homeowners, at some stage of the game, must have had good intentions and some sense of garden design, for all sorts of nice little surprises are emerging from beneath years and years of disrepair. Thanks to their decades of failure to do any raking, I have some of the finest topsoil you've ever set eyes on - rich, dark and loamy. The wildflowers are popping their little heads out of the ground with happy cries of, "Look, Mama! We can see the sky!" We have sweet, pale purple violets, bright yellow trefoil (or, as I prefer to call it, butter-and-eggs), two charming Japanese red maples beginning to unfurl the fans of their frilly leaves, and a lot of vivid-hued flowering ground cover that was clearly once planted on purpose before sloth and Smirnoff took over.The forsythia is in full riotous bloom, the robins are fat, saucy and perfectly delighted that somebody has made it so much easier to get at the worms than it used to be, and if the large, redheaded woodpecker doesn't stop jackhammering at the slat of our deck that apparently has some sort of delectable grubs in it, I am eventually going to have to Do Something besides look at him through my field glasses and marvel at the fact that there's a woodpecker, a real, live woodpecker, eating up my deck.
Welcome, sweet Springtime!
