But no! There’s a better way!

The honeysuckle is finally dead. When we moved into this house (14 years ago! 14 years ago! We’ve been here for 14 f’ing years! That means we’ve almost got some equity on our mortgage!), the bush reached up to our bedroom window. We immediately hacked it down to a more manageable size. Then every year we would hack it down more and more, and the damn thing would come back stronger than ever. We were having to cut it down four or five times a summer just to keep it from taking over the entire yard. I swear you could sit on the deck I put in next to it and just watch it grow. I’ve been hating it for so long, and it was in such a bad location, and just presented a constant problem (such as taking a step off the driveway and tumbling into it). Finally, this morning, with Sawzall and hatchet, shovel and crowbar, we ripped that thing up. It’s not only merely dead, it’s really quite sincerely dead. Now we’re going to build a new box there for vegetables and herbs, and we can stop looking at that hideous ratty bush.

That led to quite a hacking spree throughout the yard. The old juniper and rhododendron stumps in the front yard are gone (we never use the front yard, so they were easy to ignore). The girls took a whack at another stump in the side yard which has been rotting down quite nicely for the past couple of years. Then I took out the nasty wild rose bush that we pretended hid the nasty old clothesline pole in the very back corner of the yard. Then I ripped out all the rotten lilacs to make room for new shoots. Then I cut down a tree, just because I didn’t like it. Hannah was getting a little nervous, I think, because she came over to ask me to please leave the olive tree alone.

So the yard is a total mess, sticks everywhere waiting to be bundled. But we went for ice cream instead, the first trip to Lickety Split of the season.