Garden Grooming

While Dana and Peter toiled away at the last remaining stand of bamboo in our garden with pickaxes and a very long, very heavy digging iron, SoilMan was, I'm not kidding, picking leaves individually out of the rose bushes....with one hand. He needed the other one to prop himself on his knee but also because he had a sore shoulder from shoveling clay out of the bed opposite the bamboo. There are still a lot of leaves, but my suggestion that a rake might be sufficient, and certainly much quicker, fell on deaf ears....The fried leaves, which are everywhere, are not falling from the trees and we don't know what exactly will happen to them....

I suggested to Dana that we just leave the bamboo to fend for itself for a bit longer. It is a massive cluster of impenetrable stems and roots, but Dana was having none of it. She envisions a garden of native plants and bamboo doesn't fit into the equation.Despite Peter's considerable strength and careful application of Newtonian physics, the axe had a tendency to bounce off the roots like a boomerang, but they persisted and made quite a bit of headway....

I sat and watched for awhile, offering suggestions which went unheard, or at least unanswered, and busied myself sweeping sticky mud and leaves off the cement and keeping Spike from  sitting in the middle of the clump of bamboo with his ball in his mouth. He moved off to help John by knocking rocks off the rock wall and I went inside to make coffee for everybody.

I have long since given up on trying to feel that I have accomplished anything more than living another day, but it felt well lived despite the fact that I didn't do anything....  

Life returns to whatever passes for normal tomorrow. It won't be much different for us, other than the fact that we won't have our family dropping by to do hard labor in the garden....