Relative Something

When we get home from the lake on a Monday and depart the following Thursday for our friends’ lake cabin, it doesn’t leave me much time in my role as Head Groundskeeper. Making things even more complicated, another rain shower cut into the limited hours available for mowing. The trail I’ve been wanting to trim has escaped attention for longer than I hoped so far this summer.

Yesterday, while waiting for the morning dew to dry so I could mow, I grabbed the hedge trimmer and tackled as much as I could before lunch.

It doesn’t stand out much in that photo, but I was working the right side of the path to achieve a clean hedge wall out of the wild growth along our property border with the neighboring farm field. It’ll look great once I finish the full length.

This is the second summer that I have been working to shape that tangle of scrub trees into a clean natural barrier. I thought it would be a little easier the second time around, but things have grown fast and thick with all the precipitation we’ve received this summer.

I hope to make enough progress this morning to finish the north loop trail all the way to the road before time runs out and we leave for Mike and Barb’s lake place which is a 4-hour drive away.

Squeezing in a few long days of landscape work is worth the extra effort to get the payoff of another weekend of lake fun, especially with friends we will be traveling with come fall. The four of us are planning a visit to Iceland in September.

For a guy who isn’t all that fond of travel, I sure have been spending a lot of time away from home lately. When we get home from the lake this weekend, I’ll only have a few days before heading up for a weekend of biking in Hayward.

Maybe I can spend a few extra days at home during August. One of my great pleasures in life is having nowhere I need to go. I am an exception to the norm of people retiring with hopes of traveling the world.

I much prefer being in my own home more often than not.

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