Ever since we moved into the Lockardugan Estates, we’ve been playing catch-up on 50 years of poor decisions. The most visible of these is the condition of our yard, which has only barely been held at bay by a combination of mowing, judicious tree pruning, and brush removal. It’s a lot of work to stay on top of, especially in the thick of summer, when time is short and commitments pile up. It may also be the reason our neighbors seem to cut a wide swath around us; I don’t think it’s paranoia talking when I say that we’re rooted at the fringes of our local society.
Saturday morning I loaded the Scout up with a pile of brush and bags of leaves from the driveway and hauled it down to the dump. Every winter the trees in our yard drop tons of dead wood, littering the lawn, and I spend time on free days picking it all up and hauling it to the driveway for collection. We have been contacting tree removal companies for the past three weeks in the hopes that someone will give us an affordable quote to make a handful of them disappear, but so far we’ve gotten no callbacks. We’re trying very hard not to take it personally, as we did with the lawn service who didn’t return three phone calls.
On my way back I did a quick recon of area yard sales and ran into a guy who has an Early Bronco a few blocks over, and had a nice chat with him. Then I returned home for a snack and hauled the wheelbarrow across the street to pitch in at the church playground, where they put me to work hauling mulch from a pile way in the back to the various trails and areas throughout the woods on their property. By the time noon rolled around my back was sore but we’d cleaned up a huge section of land.
Returning home, I raked leaves for a couple of hours, cleaning out the back porch, driveway, hedges, and flowerbeds, which changed the outward appearance from “abandoned” to somewhere around “squatting”. The kid we hired to mow the lawn did show up on Wednesday, and did mow, but inexplicably left the median strip out front alone. After I texted him he came right back out and hit it, so hopefully this year I’ll have a regular assist on the grunt work so that I can start making progress on larger projects–new front stairs and maybe even a new walkway. Maybe when the front of the house gets cleaned up, people will start calling us back.