Y'all liked my last piece on this, so here is some more. Today I started my new very part-time job helping a neighbor with her yard. She requested today as an appointment a few days ago, and five p.m. as the starting time earlier today, so I hung around on my couch reading Lewis Lapham essays until five, and then trudged on over with my shovel and my gloves and my hand trowel, and announced my availability to work.
First, we tackled the paving stones. Setting paving stones in dirt is not something I've had a lot of experience with, but I had some sense of it. Such as, it's good that the paving stones not wobble, and that there not be sharp differences in height between neighboring paving stones or other walkways. Safety is important, especially for the older and thusly more tippy of us. Aesthetics also matters, according to the individual.
After resetting a few rows of incredibly poorly set paving stones, I was reminded that I knew a few more things about paving stones, such as that the right way to do this is to remove all the paving stones, level the whole area, stomp it down, check it with stretched strings when laser levels are not in the budget, etc. However, I am the employee, and thus must be careful about being too alpha here.
Beyond that, who am I to believe I know more about paving stones than she does? Or any of this stuff about her yard? She's lived here forever, I've lived here 13 years. She doesn't speak English wonderfully, but she gets by. My capacity for Spanish (and I have no valid excuse for this) extends to about 80 nouns, 25 adjectives and 20 verbs, none of which I can fully conjugate.
But we do seem to more or less agree on how to do things, though she seems to find the process fairly discouraging. I try to be supportive. I try to point out that she is the strongest 81 year old person I know. (I think she's the only 81 year old person I know, or the only one I know whom I know is 81 years old, but that's not really important.)
So we did the paving stones for awhile, and that is a little better, though there is much more yet to be done.
Then we moved on to digging up Bermuda grass. I mused in the process that one of my earliest memories is of gardening with my mother, which also including digging up Bermuda grass (it might have been crab grass, but I considered this poetic license). I will never have my own child dig up Bermuda grass for me, or even with me, which is kind of sad; but it's good to be doing it for a mother who has gotten a little old to do it herself, now that I am old enough to be a grandmother. There is definitely something good there.
One of the more pleasant parts of this sort of work for me is simply that I know how to do it. I know Bermuda grass inside and out; I know how to be careful with the roots of other plants. I know what the invasives are and when to ask whether they are reseeded naturalized plants that perhaps she would like left alone. One of the rules I've come up with about weeding over the years is that weeding is about the plants you know, not the ones you don't. If you don't know what it is (especially in someone else's garden), always ask first.
I pointed out again that the dead oleander might come back, but she would like to hire me again later this week to cut it down. O.K. It's her garden. I would have waited a little longer...but at the same time, I have to keep noticing that while I find her controlling, I am, in my own way, every bit as controlling about my gardens. Furiously so, in fact. Lesson to be learned there.
Her scorched earth policy is overall not at all my style, yet here I am hacking at the dry dirt, digging up grass, leaving things bare. It's her garden.
I also pointed out that the trumpet vine is returning, the trumpet vine she planted last year, and paid someone to spray to death when I (and a few other people she knew from her church) pointed out that trumpet vine is forever, and usually on top of your house in a matter of years.
Glyphosate is not what it's cracked up to be, though, and one of the things it's not is something that can reliably kill trumpet vine. Not when you spray it on one trumpet vine toadstool while the trumpet vine mycelium is gleefully running rampant through the subsurface of your yard at a rate of what seems like a foot per day. I suspect trumpet vine will continue to be in our future for some time.
My earliest experiences with my gardening neighbor included our fighting bitterly about the maintenance of this little boundary between our respective enterprises. It's a short fence, kind of a kind of cheap stock fencing; not even as stout as chain link, and not that tall. She wanted NO water crossing that boundary, because then things she had not planted would grow, and she would feel compelled to kill them, and did not want this extra cleaning to have to do.
I myself felt I was doing her a favor by sharing my water with her a little, here in the desert.
At one point she was leaving me notes on the fence requesting I fence in my water as well, in so many words. Eventually she resorted to putting up strips of tin roofing along the fence, so she didn't have to look at my weeds (that's still there, and I am still a madcap gardener).
And now, ten years later, I am on the other side of the fence, doing her bidding for a small fee. How this affects my life on this side of the fence remains to be seen, but there is no question but that it does, is, and will. After all these years and various false starts, we've gradually opened a kind of dialog. And in writing this, I wonder how much this sort of thing is really the fundamental matter of what democracy is about, working through seemingly interminable failings and small rages, and finally getting to the point of seeing each other enough to realize that you truly do have something to offer each other, and that even though you don't agree with everything, or even a lot, that the other person believes, that it is not impossible to find common ground, to progress a little together.
Because, I tell you, people; when that trumpet vine gets going, we're going to need that. That's going to take some serious negotiation, because now that I have warned her about it, and it survived anyway, I am going to start falling in love with it all over again, and I'll want to cultivate it, and she'll want to hire me to kill it.
And that, too, is what politics is about, and why politics is so hard. Because it's always about different preferences as to how to live, getting mixed up with money.
So, ideally the outcome here will be that we will negotiate about the trumpet vine. Perhaps I'll be better about killing the parts that migrate to my yard, that are near the fence. Perhaps I'll kill the parts on her side with extra industry, just as a gesture of good faith (because don't we always need at least a little good faith to get any of this shit to work at all?)
Or perhaps she will decide she likes it. She is, after all, like me, not a woman who appreciates being told what to like.
This is democracy. Anything is possible.