Blowhard

The first home that my parents purchased was a tract home that had sprouted, along with a few hundred others, in the middle of a former corn field. One of the first things they did was to plant trees and shrubs. My mom was apparently a tree hugger before they had a name for that, and she managed to squeeze six elm trees, six apple trees, a weeping willow, a dogwood, two poplars, and about twenty lilac bushes onto that lot.

I have inherited that tendency, and then some. Over the years I have continuously inserted trees of all sorts into my yard. Even though there is absolutely no room left, I always seem to find room for just one more. It is so bad that my dog Chandler gets lost in the shrubbery, and has actually got tangled in the undergrowth while trying to go poopys. For his sake, today I went out and did a little brush clearing. After a couple of hours of weed whacking, chopping, and cutting of branches, there is now at least some room for my little dog to go out and do his thing without calling in a search party.

The part of yard work that I always disliked the most was the cleanup. Sure it's fun to cut and chop things down, but when you are done you have to rake and scoop it all up. That's why I think the person who invented the leaf blower should get a medal. What a fantastic thing it is. Just turn it on and start blowing all your problems out of the yard and into your neighbors. My old blower recently broke, so I went down to the Home Depot and replaced it with a much more powerful one. The one I bought seems to have taken an engine from a Lear jet, and attached a handle to it. It is great. Now I can blow entire palm fronds into the middle of the street. I have even used it to blow away a pile of gravel that had accumulated in my parking lot. The only drawback I can see, is when my neighbors decide it's time to clean up their yards. I guess that's called blowback.