Clean-up

This is "Fall Clean-up Day" at my house. We've been busy lately and suddenly it occurs to us that its time to put the summer deck furniture away and clean the yard up. We need to cut down the ornamental grasses, dump the summer flower pots and store them, and doing some general clean-up in the yard. There are still some branches in the back of the yard that came down during Hurricane Irene, and I noticed that there are some weedy vines coming up through a couple places in the hedges that need to be pulled.

I find as we get older we don't have the constitutions for a whole day of yard work, so we'll get started early - by 8am - and by noon or 1:00 we'll come in for lunch. Once we sit long enough to eat I can be sure we won't be getting up again any time soon. So afternoon jobs will need to be more along the line of paying bills and spiffing up the house.

The fall clean-up is always nostalgic for me. It reminds me of raking the yard with my grandfather down the road, and the smell of burning leaves in the metal tub he had behind the garage for that purpose. As I'm pulling weeds out of the hedges I'll think about him in his flannel shirt and hat, piling the leaves all over the yard and talking to me about the various plants and trees in his yard. I loved my grandfather.

I wish we could still burn leaves in the fall. There is something magical about that smell and I miss it every year. And I miss my grandfather too.