NIMBY

I think it would be accurate to describe Husband's preoccupation with the landscaping of our backyard as a full-blown obsession now. He's been spending evenings after the kids have gone to bed researching dry wells, dry creeks, pond-building, and storm water on-line. He wakes up at night and can't get back to sleep for wondering what the hell could be causing our backyard to be so full of water. He even rented an extremely expensive, ornery and vicious-looking piece of machinery for the entire weekend--his birthday weekend!--so that he could spend all his daylight hours trenching through the quicksand-like mud, hauling dirt from one spot to another, and moving one of the 2 enormous piles of gravel that are still blocking the top of our driveway and easy ingress through the side door.

Sigh. It is too wearying for me to get involved anymore. After the landscaper came, built the retaining wall, and left again I assumed that it was time to begin the fun of planting. I moved around some lavender plants to a better location, I bought a whole bunch of spring-flowering items, and I even got to work extending a stone-lined pathway around the corner of the porch with all the rocks left over from the retaining wall. This is when Husband began realizing that the yard needed FAR more work than he thought and pretty much all my little projects were destroyed. The stone-lined path was plowed through so that Husband could excavate yet another drainage trench and make the gravel in the path a whole lot deeper. He plans to put a rain garden right where the drought-loving lavender bed is now located. There's a foot of mud on top of 100 spring-flowering bulbs as well as the bare, and therefore invisible, branches of a hydrangea bush. Again, sigh.

I am literally just trying not to look at the backyard anymore, much less think about it. I have instead begun painting the kitchen and dining room inside the house. I'm managing to get a wall at a time done during naptimes and while the girls are sleeping. It will be beautiful, the exact color of Breyer's coffee ice cream or a milky cafe au lait.

But painting ain't gardening. I'll be glad when this is all over.

Cozy suburban vision meets bitchy mama reality

Do any of you suburban, SAHM types have this sweet little vision of having the neighborhood go-to house like I do? You all know what I'm talking about, right? The house in the neighborhood where the rooms all have interesting stuff to play with or look at, the backyard has swings and toys and other good stuff, there are pets to chase, crafts to do, the homemade cookies flow like wine, etc? Some part of me wants our new house to be that house. Some part of me very much likes the idea of having a house full of kids that I can play mama hen to and that Bean and Sister can play with until it's time to send everyone home to their grateful parents. I want the neighborhood kids to be comfortable here, to think of me as a nice mom, to have this house be a lovely, cozy backdrop to my kids' childhood that they'll remember fondly when they're adults. Nice image, huh?

So when a neighbor lady called up a little while ago to ask if her 2 bored, out-of-school kids could come over to play for a few hours because she wasn't feeling well, I should've been all sweetness and light and getting out the plate of cookies 'cause here was a chance to live my nice neighborhood mama vision! I wasn't. To the mom I said yes, of course they could come over and I was sorry she didn't feel well and if she wanted they could have lunch here while she napped and Sister would love to see them and yada yada yada. But when I hung up I fumed quietly to myself, even as I recognized that Sister would probably snap out of her own out-of-school funk if she had someone besides Bean to play with. All I could think, though, was, "They better fuckin' all like grilled cheese and baby carrots for lunch. I better not hear any babies screaming because they're feeling left out, dammit. No one better fight..." and so on.

Just call me the neighborhood bitch.

Garden, take 2

I just returned from a late walk with the dog, doing the usual circuit around the block to get him settled in for the evening. As I approached our old house in the dusk, our former next-door neighbor approached from the opposite direction, smiling at me in the semi-dark. The first thing she said to me was, "Boy, I bet you're sad to see so many of your plants dying there. I don't think they've watered them at all!"

My poor garden! There are several things crisp beyond hope now: a variegated hydrangea that brightened up a dark corner of the yard under an old crepe myrtle, my huge, purple-flowered butterfly bush, a large (and expensive) angel's trumpet that I put in just this year, a stand of lavender-flowered phlox, a perennial geranium...and the list goes on.

Husband ran into the new owners on the street last week and actually volunteered to loan them a sprinkler. They declined, saying they had one, but were just so overwhelmed with the move that they hadn't gotten to it, felt terribly guilty about it, planned to water everything at their first opportunity, blah blah blah. It's been 2 weeks now and my beautiful garden is probably at least half-dead. If I'd know they were going to totally neglect it I would have dug some stuff up and taken my chances with replanting in the summer heat at the new place. At least I would've watered them! This is very sad to me.

Today I went into the way-back of our yard for the first time ever. For some mysterious reason, the previous owners of this house fenced in only part of the full back yard, excluding a good third of the space back there--very puzzling. Anyways, it's a small jungle behind the fence, as I verified this morning. The to-do list we'll have to get started on to even make the space for a new backyard garden is too overwhelming to even think about for very long. It goes something like this:

1. Pull up poison ivy while it still has leaves and can be identified easily.
2. Bushwhack all the seriously self-seeding poke weed NOW before the seeds ripen and drop and we have to do it all over again next year.
   
3. Bushwhack horrible, prickly blackberry brambles.
   
4. Somehow kill all the other noxious weeds carpeting various large areas along the fence. Husband wants to use herbicide, but I hate to do it with the kids so close by. On the other hand, there's a LOT to have to weed by hand, and I don't usually mind weeding.
   
5. Hire someone to take out lots of youngish pines.
6. Rip out all the chain link fence and have a nicer fence built that includes the whole backyard.
7. Have a dumptruck load of topsoil--or maybe two--delivered so that we can level the yard some and route drainage around the house rather than directly to the foundation.
8. Build a retaining wall to hold said topsoil back and border a path around the back porch.

And maybe then we can plant something.