Disagreeable Vermin

I should have known my plant-loving next-door neighbor’s mild response to my texts about the survey wasn’t the end of the matter. We did end up having a little argy-bargy over the fence in the back yard. Voices were raised. Unwelcome utterances were uttered. After a day or two, I sent a note saying I wasn’t angry any more, and that I was sorry we’d had an unpleasant interaction, and that we are still friends even if we get angry with each other from time to time. He send a similarly conciliatory note back. Among my annoyances was that he pulled up a couple of the surveyors’ markers, which is potentially actually illegal, if it is done with the intention of colonizing land one is not entitled to.

Fortunately, there is a permanent marker in the ground right near one of the stakes he pulled up, and the position of the other can be re-calculated by myself if needed. Not needed at the moment or maybe ever. I am going to try to use fewer semicolons. 

Really, my biggest anxiety is that my neighbor will decimate the forsythias from his side of them, as he has decided not to understand where the lot line is. He has already carved into them farther than he should have—I suspect this kind of worry / tension, one form of it or another, afflicts about 95 percent of homeowners at one moment or another—but I am trying to upgrade my feeling about this to a preference. Rather than, “I will die if he wrecks my forsythias!,” I am trying to remember to think, “I would prefer he did not.” Honestly, if he made them entirely disappear, which he almost certainly won’t, I could then just put a fence there and be done with it, though I would be mournful, since my father planted those plants.

Last night, the temperature dipped into the 30s for the first time this year. Within the past week I’m pretty sure it was nearly 80 degrees, leading one forsythia, more gullible than the rest, or maybe it’s just a different type, to produce cheerful bright yellow blooms here and there all over its entire surface. This one is not with the aforementioned. It’s next to the driveway.

Last Sunday I got to attend the annual block party for the first time. This was the third or fourth such event. It was inaugurated by a community-minded young couple who moved in, let’s say, three or four years ago. Normally the party is in the summer, but scheduling conflicts caused it to be November 1 this year. It was delightful. I met several very congenial people and am now even more excited than I was before to be part of this friendly neighborhood. Today I met a very nice brand-new neighbor, a woman who recently bought a house down the block.

This past week, I succeeded in signing up for the Affordable Care Act in Michigan, so my monthly premium for December will be $900-something instead of the $1333 it has been all this year, thanks to The Big Ugly Bill. (Election Day! Holy moly!) (Though my deductible rose from $6000-something to $10,600.)

On Election Day, I served as a poll monitor at a church not far from my house, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It was entirely without incident. I got to answer a question or two and assist a woman with a cane into the building. A few people thanked me. Mainly I strolled up and down in the parking lot for three hours wishing it were just a little warmer out.

I met with my and my mother’s accountant about the trust’s income taxes and about my own. Normally I do my taxes myself without too much trouble, but this year I bought a house, moved to another state, took money from a retirement account and a brokerage account, and had Affordable Care Act health insurance from two different states, so I thought it might be best to let a professional handle it this time. I like my accountant a lot. We had a great chat. She said I was very calm about the cost of the Affordable Care Act. I said, “What are you going to do?” She said, “I’m angry on your behalf.”

I don’t understand this yet, but she said that the trust’s losses could be distributed among myself and my sisters for use on our own taxes. This is represented on a K-1 form. I asked my sisters if they would like this. My sister said sure. The other sister became hysterical and there was yet another barrage of verbal abuse and name calling before she blocked me, which she seems to think is a fearsome punishment, though the primary emotion experienced by myself was relief or possibly even joy.

Among other things, she said she can’t decide if I’m evil or merely stupid, “though for me the result is the same.” Since then, I have said to my sister a time or two something along the lines of, “I can’t decide if you’re three-quarters of a cup of toe jam or merely a disagreeable vermin, but for me the result is the same!”

Yesterday evening was our monthly Pizza Night. I felt so melancholy after the first couple that I felt like saying I didn’t want any more pizza nights. It just seemed so sad to sit at that table with one person where there used to be three, but last night, it seemed perfectly delightful. Also, there was pizza and triple-cheese bread.

I bought a huge number of lawn and leaf bags in the past couple of months, not understanding that yard waste pickup does not occur year round. (What if the snow melted and I plucked a twig off the lawn?) This year it ends on a certain day in November. For most of the year, yard waste is picked up every other week, the same day as recycling, while trash is picked up weekly. However, during “peak leaf season,” they start picking up yard waste every week, and they do this until they stop picking up yard waste for the year. Unfortunately, I am going to miss the final two weeks of weekly yard waste pickup, and I have a lot of leaves, though only a small fraction underfoot compared to what is still on the big silver maple in the back yard. (But not for long. That tree is in danger of falling over and is due to be removed in December, which will greatly cut down on leaves next year.)

I am going to make a note not to travel for Thanksgiving next year until after the end of weekly yard waste pickup.

I have scheduled three days on which I will rake leaves before going to San Francisco next weekend. This morning, when my sister came over to learn how to feed the cats, we discussed the possibility of my getting a mulching lawn mower, which chops up leaves and re-deposits them on the lawn. You don’t have to get every last leaf off your lawn before winter, but you don’t want to leave a thick layer that will become a sodden lawn-killing mass.

After my sister was gone, I went out to drain the garden hoses and put them in the garage for the winter. First I looked up how to drain a garden hose. You pick up one end and feed that end upward through your hands so that the miracle of gravity eventually allows the water to fall out of the other end. I thought there might be more to it, but there’s not.

Since there are so many leaves, even though it wasn’t on my schedule, and with the recognition that the weather was about as good as it gets for raking leaves (not freezing cold, not raining, not gloomily overcast, not extremely windy), I rolled my plastic yard waste bin into the back yard and worked on this a little. I have changed my philosophy of leaf raking to good effect and don’t think I will need that mulching lawn mower quite yet. 

I had been thinking, “I have to get out there and rake the yard!” Today, with the bin close at hand, I merely used the lighter, smaller rake, which I can see my father got a lot of use out of (it appears battered, and some of the tines are broken off), to assemble enough leaves to make it worth bending over to use my pair of red plastic toothy grabbers to pick up just that one pile of leaves and deposit it in the paper lawn and leaf bag inside the plastic bin. And then I did that once more, and yet again, until I felt that was sufficient effort for one day. It took not even an hour, I don’t think, and caused about a third of the grass in the back yard to reappear, though it will disappear again soon. I can do this.

I have had a mixed experience with the fellow whose crew has been doing yard work here occasionally. He is a really nice young man, but the communication is excruciatingly difficult, and his billing has sometimes proven to be not quite accurate. My tree guy gave me the name of a professional gardener who came over this week. I liked him right away and it looks like he can remove a lot of smaller black walnut and Norway maple trees that I thought I would have to pay the tree guy to remove.

I am hoping that, in the spring, he can spend a couple of hours with me explaining how to prune the forsythias and viburnum and yew hedge and yew shrub and watching me take a crack at it, and that he can do a similar thing in the fall, for the tasks that occur at that time of year, and that he can explain when to do what.

Also, when I was at the block party, one of my neighbors said her mother-in-law is a master gardener who enjoys coaching others; she said to just knock on her door if I’d like to talk to her mother-in-law.

As I walked this afternoon, I snuck peeks at the lawn and leaf bags others have leaning against their curbs to see what they favor: Lowe’s, Home Depot, ACE, some with no logo whatsoever. One house had both ACE and Home Depot, which makes you wonder just what’s going on there. (I’m an ACE person, myself.)

So, this is a lot of work, but I am regularly reminding myself that it doesn’t have to be perfect. For a while, I felt melancholy about having a house and all its related chores, mainly because, as far as I can tell, this is the last chapter before, if I’m lucky, I go to live in a retirement community or, if I’m not, memory care. I’m 64! How long can it be until that happens?

Well, who knows? But! It isn’t happening today. Maybe literally tomorrow, but today I was able to get out of bed once again unassisted. I was able to prepare my own breakfast. I was able to rake a surprising amount of leaves without it seeming like work. The chores are the price of having my own little expanse of the outdoors to tend, or not having it, really, but, for a time, being its guardian.