In between stitching sessions I've been working on some trail blazing and as I approached the rapidly diminishing mulch pile for the umpteenth time I had a Close Encounters moment ...
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| Okay, I confess ... I stretched the image up a bit for emphasis |
Visions of Richard Dreyfuss making mashed potato renderings of Devils Tower danced in my head ...
Go look on YouTube, you know you want to. I'll wait.
So anyway, the mulch pile has been shrinking because I've been on a mission to make the pathway safer between our house and our neighbors' ... one two-by-three foot tub-full at a time ...
Slowly, but surely covering over twenty yards of rocky, rutted ground with a four-inch layer of chipped wood and brush, give or take an inch ...
All the while thinking about "Good fences make good neighbors" from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall. A saying which is is ambiguously received in the poem because "something there is that doesn't love a wall."
Fortunately, we have the right kind of good neighbors and this I know for certain because "there where we do not need the wall" there is instead a gap ...
Fortunately, we have the right kind of good neighbors and this I know for certain because "there where we do not need the wall" there is instead a gap ...
... into which I have now laid a seventy foot welcome mat.
Of course it would figure after I hauled and leveled the last load of mulch, Don mused, "Do you think we should have asked them first?"
I love the path you made, Liz and I bet your neighbor will love it too. You have an amazing spirit - it shows in everything you do!
ReplyDeleteLife is just plain fun these days ... and while there's a part of me that misses the incredibly crisp smell and muffled sound of new fallen snow, there's another part of me that revels in having to change into a t-shirt in January.
Deleteyou don't have a wheelbarrow?
ReplyDeleteOh yes, Don uses the wheelbarrow all the time ... but I don't like shoveling mulch into it and lifting it and then trying to navigate it through all the rocks.
DeleteInstead, I tip my $15 cement mixing tub next to the mulch, rake it in easy as can be, then skim it over the rocks with a rope pull ... taking advantage of my legs being stronger than my upper body basically.
this is great...the Technique that you have discovered and i LOVE so much the path. Whether
ReplyDeleteor not it is much used, it is here are a Grand and Loving GESTURE...that says...Welcome.
For sure it will (continue to) be used as we keep an eye on their place when they are out of town and they do the same for us. What I really appreciate is that we get along so well, even though their side of the rock wall is kept mowed and our side is uncut prairie grass (which is what makes me think they will appreciate the mulched path).
Deletehahahaha, excellent question!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely an "oh crap ... you think?" moment
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