One of the things that I’d forgotten in nine years of renting is just how much work owning a house is. At the old place, the landlord handled the major renovations and I’d hired a guy to mow the lawns. I did small stuff, like fixing toilets or gardening, but the big stuff wasn’t my problem.

I’ve owned houses before, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it has been. We bought a reposessed house, so it wasn’t exactly turn-key, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Replacing a few appliances and cleaning up hasn’t been that much of a back-breaker, but now we’ve dived into yardwork.

Junior’s been mowing the lawns, which we started watering when we moved in. They’ve sort of come back; we’ll see what they look like in the spring. We trimmed up some Liquid Amber trees along the driveway so I wouldn’t get bopped in the head every time I tried to get around the truck. We’ve pulled weeds, sprayed round-up, and plotted future actions.

I have to admit, Junior’s done most of the heavy lifting. Mowing gives me a killer asthma attack, so I stay away from that, and he does most of it during the days when I’m not around anyway.

This weekend was Fruitless Mullberry tree weekend of doom. They’re those trees that you have to cut all of the branches off each winter, leaving ugly knobs waving in the air like a mutant fist. We each hate them, but for different reasons. I think they’re repulsively ugly when they’re trimmed up, and Junior hates working on them every year. Two were blocking the access along the shop into the back yard, and we agreed that they were coming out. He’d trimmed one of them a few weeks ago but life sidetracked us and I’d been climbing over the stack of now-dead branches to get to the trash cans for a few weeks.

I should have known that it would be a big job when he brought the flatbed trailer home. We had to put the kennel together to corral the dogs before we could unscrew the temporary closure on the gate to the highway; the lot’s narrow and we can’t get a vehicle down the side of the shop. The gate’s just barely big enough to get a truck through, and is on a later list of fix-its.

While Junior de-limbed the other tree by the shop, John and I stacked the previously trimmed branches on the trailer, along with all of the other yard waste we’ve accumulated. I thought we were just going to cut these things down, but Junior asked me to bring the Dodge around back. We hitched it up to the tree with a couple of chains and started applying tension. The truck was sitting on concrete though, and even in four-low, I was spinning all four tires. Tires are expensive for that truck, so that made me twitchy.

 

Junior had a Plan B though. He wanted me to give it a little slack and then gun it so we’d throw the truck’s weight into the tree. I did, but it made me nervous and wasn’t really getting us much farther. Every time felt like I was slamming the truck into a wall. Plan C involved digging out the roots a little bit and getting into them with an axe. Once a couple of big roots were cut through, the truck made a perfectly fine tractor. We dragged that stump out of there and cut it up and put it on the trailer. Repeat for the next two trees.

 

The last and biggest tree was in a little weird corner of the lot, resting on two fences. It was hanging way over into the neighbor’s yard, shading the garden, and just generally being a pain in the ass. It had to go, but no amount of yanking on it was budging it. We decided to take it down one major branch at a time, but Junior had to be up underneath it cutting with the chainsaw while I put slow pressure on it with the truck. I didn’t like that part, pulling on a tree my husband was working on, but we did it.

Now, feeling the branch give way and pulling it off the tree was rather satisfying. This one tree made a second dump load all by itself, and we were wore out by the end of the day. Pizza was in order. We didn’t even stop for lunch; John fixed mac-n-cheese for the rest of the kids.

I’ve done my share of hard physical work, and yardwork won’t ever be my favorite, but it’s so much more rewarding to be making improvements to our own place. Seeing the progress makes lifting every branch up above my head worthwhile. But man, does my back ache.