All three of you readers might remember that Gene and I had three projects planned when we moved in: replacing the windows, remodeling the kitchen and remodeling the yard. We’ve finished the first one, and now we’re getting ready to start work on the yard. Not a minute too soon, either — yesterday we were roaming around outside trying to picture the final product and noticed that the fig tree has crept a little closer to the house. It keeps doing this while we sleep. Some would call it “growing,” but I call it “creepily plant-walking inch by inch until it gets close enough to eat us.” So it’s high time that business was chopped down and replaced by plants that know their place.
Not just the fig is at stake, of course. Nearly every plant out there is coming down, to be replaced by beautiful tidy plants that will grow exactly the way they’re supposed to and not try to kill us in our sleep. I’m no gardener but I feel sure about this — every single new plant will be completely perfect forever. Mind you I’ve only seen pictures of most of the plants on our list, so when I picture it I imagine the yard filled with cardboard cutouts of plants. It will be so beautiful until the rains come.
The eventual increase in privacy when our fence-side plants grow up is also going to be welcome. Gene came into my library to chat with me the other day and kind of choked on a word midway through, glancing out the window over my shoulder. “Um…did you know…” he started awkwardly, in the cadence of a man who’s just seen a spider crawling on his phobic wife.
“That the old lady in the apartment building next door can — and does — see right into my library window from her balcony?” I finished, in the resigned tone of a phobic wife who has experienced this particular spider so many times — and has indeed carried this spider’s mail to the mailbox and listened patiently to a horrifying story about this spider’s medical issues — that it has ceased to hold any horror for her. Yes, those privacy plants cannot come too soon for me.
With any luck, we’ll be starting work next week! Stay tuned for pictures. Shit is about to get epic, or as epic as things get for a suburban housewife re-doing her yard.