Building a wall

The truth is, I have appropriated my neighbor's yard.

My next door neighbor Jim and I made a deal six years ago when I moved into our house here in Greenbelt. For the priviledge of storing my mower and gardening tools in his shed, I would take care of his yard. For Jim, this was a no brainer. He doesn't know an azeala from a daffodil and has absolutely no desire to ever pick up a rake or put a shovel in the ground. For me, I get more work, but I also get more room to play.

Let's consider the "more work" part of that equation. I haven't planted much in Jim's yard (it is HIS yard after all) but I mow, rake, trim, sweep and generally keep it neat and pretty. The biggest project came last spring. I had never cut back the red tips in front of Jim's house. Frankly, they were so big -- up to the roofline -- that I didn't want to tackle them and to have to clean up all the dead leaves and mess underneath them.
Then came three feet of snow last February, and the red tips were bent to the ground. When the warmer weather came, I had to do something. So one Sunday afternoon, I borrowed a bow saw from a neighbor and started cutting them down to size.

Once I was done with the red tips, I realized that the scraggly-looking cedar bushes needed to go, too. And then I needed to rake all those old leaves up. When I was all finished, it looked like a disaster area! No more towering red tips, just red tip stumps and a newly exposed heat pump on a barren bed of dirt.

For days I kept looking at this stark scene in front of Jim's house, wondering if my actions had been a bit too drastic. I knew that the red tips would come back and make great-looking hedge bushes along the front of the house, but we'd have to suffer through an ugly period of regneration first. That's when I got the idea for the border wall. I decided to make a bed around the red tip area because I knew that someday it would be the focal point of Jim's yard. I wanted to build a little wall that would signify that this area was going to be special, even though at that moment it was decidedly not.

Building a wall, even a low simple wall, requires more lifting and carrying of stone than you think. (It also requires more stone than you think, which means yet another trip to Lowe's.) As with my gardening, I am an amateur when it comes to building walls. I do it by sight, not with chalk lines or strings that have been measured to be level. Just a stepping back and sizing up with head tilted and murmurings to myself to lower that stone or put more dirt under that one.

In the end, it didn't look like much. A few rows of stone surrounding some red tip stumps and a heat pump. But I felt better for having put something new in place of the old, and the gardener in me -- that part that has faith that the bulbs I plant in the cold of November will bloom in the sun of spring -- could imagine what it all would look like when the leaves have come out on the red tips and a layer of mulch is covering the dirt.

Almost a year later, my vision is starting to become reality. So yes, Jim got a good deal on getting his yard cared for, but I think I got the better bargain.