When I was riding along with Der Bingle in Dayton, I got to let my eyes wander to more things than the road ahead of me.  Dayton is at what I call the beginning of the Ohio River descent, which is to say there are a lot of places where you can be in a populated area and still have ravines and expanses of vegetation. And in Dayton, there were a lot of green blurs, not just the easy-to-see through stick formations that have been lining the roads here for so long.

I’m been around the barn a few times when it comes to seasons, but this is the first year that I have not anticipated the budding of the trees and bushes because winter has seemed so entrenched. Because I have not been thinking about things getting green, I did not give any thought to pulling out the grape vine that was strangling the side hedge.

This is not a task you want to undertake in summer, but I did anyway one year and discovered it was like separating fly strips. So I got Cameron and we went out to the hedge this afternoon; it didn’t look too daunting. It was a bunch of tangling branches, but looked as if you could select a grape branch, follow it to its source, use the pruning saw and slip it out.

No. Not only is it not slippery like spaghetti (that has not been overcooked), it is very strong. In fact, I now suspect it may have some inbuilt defense response that shouts out: Heads up, guys, it’s tug of war time. More than once, we had to apply our combined weight to get the section we had detached to give up its hold on the hedge. It was about the intensity of the reverse of putting a stubborn cat in a carrier.

By the time we had a good bit of it out, I felt as if we had been fighting a tentacled monster in some scary thriller. Lying on the ground, it looks like a monster, not the stuff of which attractive grapevine wreathes are made.

Now I am waiting for the sunlight to reach into the sparse depths of the hedge and encourage it to leaf out and thicken. I am not giving up hope on that one; I have actually succeeded to some degree in getting the hedge to spread out to the north a bit so it is not a just a property line fence. The myrtle that has been on a transplant migration from Fountain County, Indiana to LaGrange County to here is spreading nicely. An entire yard of myrtle might not be bad (if you don’t plan to play croquet).

Tomorrow the hedge clippers for the evergreen shrubs in front, with Cameron to clip away and me to hold the cord  . . . because when working alone, you try to be careful but get tired and think just a bit more and CUT THE CORD. It’s moments such as that that make even the foulest-mouthed person just sigh in extreme frustration and only manage an Ah Shucks. Then there is the walk of shame back to the garage with this large implement trailing a foot of brightly-colored extension cord. Nothing better than that to take the spring out of your step.