The Longest Yard

And then of course, there is my yard.

Or rather, my labor camp. The endless, thankless, sweatshop of a responsibility that never relents in its quest to wear me down to a calloused, blistered, sunburned, exhausted little nub.

The shape of the yard is irregular, which makes for creative mowing on the best of days. There is no orderly back and forth with right angles and straight lines. No, mine is a pie-wedge shaped corner, surrounded in part by hedges and trees, made more "interesting" by sloping hills, and steeply-graded drops, uneven terrain, patches of dirt, predatory weeds and oddly-placed plantings between which a standard mower can not be forcibly jammed.

I also have a behemoth hedge that grows several feet a week, that protrudes out over the sidewalk to scrape the arms and gouge eyeballs of passing school children, and which matures at an alarming rate, so that cutting it back requires a hedge trimmer, a saw, a tree saw, and a chain saw. All of which scare me just a little.

When Lars and I had bought the house, (the house with two addresses because it has a street on both sides) the yard had been open and exposed on all sides. Our only neighbor erected a 6 foot fence separating the properties (Thank God for small miracles; their property sometimes looks like the set of Sanford and Son).  But we needed a little more separation from the world. We could have gotten a permit for a fence, but Lars and I wanted to take a greener measure and plant a hedge.

I wanted more of an impression of privacy ---- something that suggested that our yard was not the one to cut through, or let your dog take a crap on, or to sit in at night and drink your underage, contraband beer, even though the little clump of trees at the point on the end of the property was an ideal place to do so. Lars had other ideas. He wanted a hedge that provided actual privacy. A hedge so tall and dense I could sit in Pat's sandbox stark naked. A hedge that could be seen from the moon like the Great Wall of China.

He insisted. I caved. I had a four month old and was newly pregnant. I had bigger fish to fry than to argue needlessly over the merits of a privet versus a Chinese Elm hedge.

Should have made a Federal case out of it. Because now, I do have the Great Wall of China to maintain, and it stands 4 feet above my head in places, and I can barely lift the chainsaw let alone use it properly. And I have a strange fear that I will hack off a limb one day, and because the hedge provides such privacy, no one would find me but the squirrels.

And we haven't even begun to talk about the weeds.