PROJECTS

Eyes

12 Likes, 0 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Eyes"

We have this corner of the garage that has become the place to dump things you are too lazy to put back where they belong. Camp chairs, old motorcycle helmets, tools, old chicken feed bags filled with glass recycling, trash. All of it is just piled in this corner and you have to climb over it all to get to anything useful. Once you retrieve the useful thing, you don’t feel like climbing over the pile again. So you just add the useful thing to the pile. That corner is basically that closet you’ve seen in some silly sitcom. If you open the door, all of the things are going to just spill out like an avalanche. I felt like Saturday was a good day to tackle that corner. So I sorted and put things back where they belong. While I was at it, I came across our set of heavy duty pruning shears and when I had finished with the garage, I put on my gardening gloves, grabbed the shears and headed outside.

Last summer, I think it was before we went to Boston, Michael sprayed our entire fence line with a kill-it-all kind of poison. We had just reached our wits end with the overgrowth and poison ivy. When we came home from our trip, every thing growing on the fence was brown, including a large circle of grass where Micheal had walked with sprayer dribbling. The neighbors on the west side of our fence got out and cut and cleared all of the dead stuff. They put down mulch along their side of the fence in hopes that it would keep things from growing back. So far it is working. I figured since I had no where to go and since the day was bright and warm, I would tackle cutting and clearing the east side of the fence. I started at one end and slowly worked my way down the fence line, cutting and pulling at dead and dried up vine and trees. I dug leaves away to cut the trunks of vines at the fence line hoping to keep things from growing back. When I was near the halfway part of the fence, Michael came out and started working on some adjustments to our new chicken coop. Then he helped me gather up all the dried cut away stuff into a pile for burning in the fire pit.

By the time I finished, I was muddy, my hands were sore and blistered and I couldn’t stand up straight. My arms are covered in scratches and were so itchy that when I got out of the shower, I slathered on hydrocortisone cream like lotion. In fact, I still can’t stand up straight. I have to ease myself off of the couch or out a chair and then I wince in pain as I bring myself up to standing. I have ended my first week of our quarantine by breaking myself. There is probably more of that come. We ordered a new enclosure of our new chicken coop along with some new feeders. We will be building a new space for the girls as soon as it all gets delivered. We would also like to line the fence with mulch, maybe pile up more dirt around the house to prevent water from getting into the basement. And that’s just the backyard. If anything, we might finally have a nice yard that doesn’t look so trashy.

The upside of all of this is that we are finally getting around to those household projects we’ve been ignoring.