Task "A:" Every Ten Years (or so)

Every spring, something makes me decide, against all better judgment to do some yard work.  

Mount Leaverest

There are two times of year when I have that urge, autumn, and spring.  Usually I resist the urge until it goes away. 

Occasionally I succumb and do something stupid like prune bushes or try to fertilize stuff.  It never ends well and I usually only succeed in spending money in a totally unnoticeable way.

This year, the weather started warming up and on a particularly beguiling Saturday morning I decided to clean out the accretion of leaves from the azalea beds.  

Not being a complete bone head, I stopped to evaluate my mental health, and assess the amount of work needed to complete the task. All this preparation prior to even putting on my work clothes.  I was going to KILL awesomeness today!!!

It seemed like a simple enough task; rake out the old leaves from under and around the azaleas, and spread some fertilizer.

Simple enough.

I glanced at the sun beginning its climb up the eastern slope of the sky, and smiled to myself.  With some enthusiasm, I could be finished by mid-afternoon, and have the rest of the glorious day to waste any way I wanted to.

This is the kind of thought I usually have right before some Armageddon like event.

It’s like when I go to the auto parts store to inquire about the likelihood that I can do some sort of Zen level repair.  The guy behind the counter that was born with a torque wrench in his hand says, “Sure! It’s easy!  All you gotta do is…..” 

Then he proceeds to tell me three easy steps to a new engine and I get all excited, jumping up and down and yell, “SOLD!”

Twelve hours later, after suffering defeat after humiliating defeat at the hands of an alternator, I’m convinced cars were built for the sole purpose of destroying my sense of manhood.

Anyway, that’s cars and this is just a bunch of leaves so……

A quick trip to the shed and I secured everything I needed. Or I would have if I had actually been able to make a quick trip to the shed and secure everything I needed. I can't do quick trips; my quick trips are punctuated with long, frustrating interludes.

I’m one of those people who can’t simply accomplish task “A.”  Task “A” usually requires that I finish task “M” which was started a month ago and never actually completed.  Task “M” didn’t get done because it required that task “F” be fixed again.  Task “F” was never properly accomplished the first time because while doing task “Q” I used the wrong part/chemical/bolt/beer. The subsequent effect was that task “X” (which task “F” relied upon) never actually got finished………. leaving all dependent tasks deficient.

By the time I get the backlog of tasks updated, I’ve often forgotten what the original task was that I was setting out to do. It’s okay though, the next time I try a new task, I’ll be reminded what I've forgotten to do and I can get it done then.  This is a messy system but effective given enough time.

But I digress as usual.

After repairing the shed door, setting a mouse trap, sharpening the pruning shears, rearranging paint cans, and washing the dog, I finally pulled out the rake, ground sheet and other miscellaneous tools and set to work.

A quick glance over my shoulder told me that the sun had somehow managed to get from the east to the west without ever once warning me the day was slipping away.  Stupid sun!  Of course, that realization made me also realize I had missed lunch.

Well, no time like the present to tuck into a good sandwich.

An hour later, after loading the dishwasher, putting in a load of laundry, and gobbling a banana while remembering I had failed to get sandwich fixin's the last time I was at the store, I was back outside to “get this bitch knocked out!”  I attacked the job of raking out the azalea beds (a loose euphemism for scads of azaleas gone wild)  with gusto.  

Later that “gusto” would become desperation punctuated with bursts of maniacal laughter, but for now I still had some positive enthusiasm.

One thing I failed to take into account before embarking on this ridiculous yard work project, was that I had never actually done it before; at least not in the last ten years or so.  The “build-up” of leaves was so deep, it would have taken a track hoe half a day to dig down to the bottom.  

By the time I had excavated down to the level of the early Pleistocene epoch, the sun was low in the sky and all I had managed to do was create several piles of moldering leaves large enough to be spotted from the ISS.

Obviously the neighbors must have been using my azalea beds to dump their own leaves.  They must have carted loads of them in bag by bag over the years at night while I slept.  Funny I had never caught the scoundrels doing this heinous deed, but clearly there had been mischief afoot.

Now I had raked them all back out in a slightly scaled down version of the Himalayas sculpted from organic material.  It was going to take more than a little while to rake all these mountainous piles onto a ground sheet and cart them across the back-forty to dump them in the woods.  A task I didn’t relish doing another day, but light was fading almost as quickly as my will to continue.

For one brief, mad moment, I considered bringing out lights and working into the darkness.  If I could just make a hard push, and get it done…….. but pain, hunger, depression, and thirst drove me indoors for the night.

The next day, Sunday, dawned even brighter and more glorious than the day before.  Of course that was merely Mother Earth's way of mocking me, because she knew I had an assload of work to do and wouldn’t actually be able to enjoy such a gorgeous day.

Determined not to let incomplete task “W” side track me, I gulped a quick cup of coffee, downed a banana (while making a mental note to PLEASE remember to get some damn sandwich fixin’s soon) and headed out the door with substantially less good will than the day before.

To make a longer story long, I spent the entire day spreading the ground sheet, raking moldy leaves onto it, half-carrying-half-dragging load upon load (each load the approximate size of an adolescent elephant) across the yard and dumping it in a spot near the edge of the woods.  During that entire time, my dog Tinker spent her day alternating between galloping through the piles of leaves, lying in the sun / shade, or romping about.  The whole time she kept eyeing me with that “stupid human” look and telepathically suggesting we give up this madness and head to the park instead.

I had reached an out of body state by that time and could not be dissuaded.

By the end of day, with all the repetition (the mind numbing, back breaking repetition) of raking, cussing, grabbing, dragging, cussing, dumping, raking, dragging, cussing, etc…, I had gotten pretty efficient at moving the mountainous piles.  Such was my efficiency that before the sun had crashed on the second day, I had transported everything overland and had created one humongous pile of leaves. A mound of organic material substantial enough to eventually become a new feature on Google Earth.

Even though I had totally wasted one of Mother Nature’s best weekends on record, I had to admit that with all the fun stuff I could have been doing instead of cleaning out the azalea beds, nothing would have been nearly as satisfying.  At least that’s the lie I will keep telling myself in the hopes that one day I might believe it.

On the other hand, with all the experience I gained, it’s good to know that things should go far more quickly and efficiently the next time I have to do this……say in ten years or so.