The Snow in June

It's Michigan.  It could happen.

But I'm not talking about actual snow.  Thank goodness.

Every June our yard and driveway are inundated with elm tree seeds.  They are penny-sized disks that float down with the ferocity of a blizzard from our neighbor's tree. The wind swirls them around and they form drifts along the garage.  When we're ambitious, we scoop them up and haul them away by the garbage bag full.  When we're not, they blow around, inserting themselves into every nook they can find.  The space between the windshield and the hood of the truck.  Inside the door jambs. Crammed into the cracks into the driveway.  Blanketing every flower pot and flower bed and clinging to the kids' clothes as they rolled around in them like snow.

The seeds that find even the barest favorable spot grow. Like weeds. I pull them out of the rocks in the landscaping, out of the cracks in the driveway, even out of the minuscule space between the garage and the driveway. Once I pulled an entire grocery bag full out of a 6" x 24" flower basket.

This year the kids have been pulverizing the drift of seeds with their bikes.  Perhaps, there will be less tree pulling in my future.

Building a fence

When we moved into our house ten years ago, the backyards was mostly surrounded by a fence.  Since we had a dog that we didn't want to escape (what were we thinking?) nor did we want him to leave deposits in other people's yards, we filled the holes, knowing we would eventually have to replace the entire structure.

Each year the squashiness of the wood and the inability of it to hold screws for repairs made the replacement more of a necessity.

For the last couple years, we expected to use money from our tax return to build a new one, but we needed a new dishwasher, then a new stove.  Then there were the trees.

Our postage-stamp size backyard had three towering trees: two diseased elms and a half-dead maple.  They provided wonderful, late afternoon shade to the yard, but with each windstorm more branches fell.  The limbs from the maple that broke were not the dead ones on the opposite side of the house.  They were the lives ones closest to the kitchen and the kids' bedroom.  The time we were eating breakfast in the kitchen and a significant storm made me scared enough to move everyone to the dining room was the day I was ready for the trees to come down. (Preferably not in a windstorm.)

But cutting the trees meant more delays in the fence.  My husband was sure removing the trees would damage the fence.  Limbs would fall and smash it and he didn't want that to happen to a new fence.  Well, he was right.  Several branches crushed sections in to oblivion.

So finally, Memorial Day weekend, we built a new fence.  (By 'we', I mean my husband and father-in-law.  I hauled some of the wood around the yard.  I attempted to loosen some of the old fence posts, but I seemed to be really good at picking the ones that were surrounded by tree roots.)  The new fence looks so much better than the rotting, mold-eaten blue-gray monstrosity.

Maybe now we'll finally get sod to repair the yard.

Don't hold your breath.