Well Begun

The back yard of our new house is an old creek bed.  The creek doesn’t flow through our yard any more because construction upstream blocked it in (damn!) so it trickles into my neighbor’s yard.  It would make a swamp, but he dug out a culvert and lined it with stones.  It’s quite pretty, except for the plastic flamingoes, and it keeps the mud and mosquitoes out of our yard, so we like it.

Our yard would be quite steep except that the prior owners of our new house, who are among the nicest people we have ever met, built stone terraces in the yard with a stone stair leading from the house to the jungle of vinca and dead trees in the dry creek bed. A friend who was over yesterday for beer and potato chips said that our back yard looks like a Mayan temple which is probably the nicest thing any of our friends has said about our new house.  I countered that it looks more like a Ziggurat and he challenged me to write a post about on my blog, which, he pointed out, I have been neglecting.  This is the kind of thing I am talking about when I say that my friends are awesome and I do not deserve them.

There are six separate areas of our terraces.  The top, next to the house, is what passes for a lawn.  Half of it is an almost-finished sunny deck with a pergola overlooking a “lawn” (weeds with dirt) and the creek bed, and the other half is a stone terrace outside our bedroom with some “lawn” (dirt with weeds) and a couple of mature elms perfectly situated to hold a Pawley’s Island Hammock.  We just planted a row of Little Gem magnolias along the edge of the top terrace to create a little more privacy on that half of the lawn. The middle terraces are empty except for a composter, raised vegetable garden, and mix of grass and weeds.  The bottom terraces, on either side of the stair, each hold a mature elm tree.  On the right facing the creek bed, we built a primitive fire pit.  I was surprised to discover, after we had closed on the house, that there is, in fact, a bottom left terrace, because it is completely covered in vinca.  I’ve been planning to pull it up for over a month.

Today would be the day I tackled the vinca.  It rained all day yesterday, and it’s not so hot, so I began pulling it up.  If you cannot understand why pulling up weeds is fun for people with cancer then you have no imagination at all and should stop reading this blog and go look at another web site. After a while, or five minutes, I took stock.  I had pulled up a huge pile of vinca, and yet barely made a dent.  I resolved to stop looking at how much progress I had made until I reached the elm tree in the middle of the terrace.

Right as I reached the elm, Chris came out to check on me, and to help.  I had finished my goal, pulling up half the vinca, so I came inside to bandage my hands that were ripped to shreds pulling up weeds, and to write.

The moral of the story is that when they tell you to wear gloves while gardening, you should listen.  My hands are covered in bandaids — and in the time it has taken me to take care of my wounds and write this post, Chris, who is wonderful, has finished pulling up the vinca on the rest of the terrace.

If you want to finish a job, you have to start it.  That’s the other moral of the story.