maintenance

We’re staying in town this week and weekend.  There’s an opening at the Houston Center for Creative Craft on Friday and a friend of mine has some work in the show and my glassblower friends, Dick and Kathy, are having their spring open house this weekend, but the main reason is that we have to do some maintenance on the yard here in town.  For well over a year, all our weekends have been spent at the country house and weekends were always when I had time and permission to work in the yard.  

The neglect started much longer ago though.  Once we started looking for a place out of Houston, the mental, and in a way, physical, attachment to this place had to start to diminish.  It takes me a long time to put down roots and an equally long time to pull them up.  I had to stop investing myself in this spot, in my small parcel of land.  I stopped working the flower beds, only doing minimal maintenance of existing perennials.  I never had much grass and I have let two ground covers loose but things have really gotten out of control.  Trees have sprouted all over and the ditches really need to be cleaned and mowed.  The wild petunias have totally taken over the side of the house.  You almost need a machete over there and the small backyard just has a path running through the wildness.

My yard has always verged on barely restrained chaos but it was a lovely and lively chaos, a refuge for all living things.  No poisons, no indiscriminate killing allowed in my borders.  I’m starting to recreate that in my new place, making it over into my image but I worry about the small life I am leaving behind, the creatures who have lived under my protection for so long.  Ultimately, we will sell this place and it will be razed.