<< BACK TO PREVIOUS PAGE

Yard work sure beats shoveling snow... somehow

The warm weather is here and my neighbours and I all think it’s “great.”
I know this because we all say to each other, “Great day!” to which the reply is always, “Great!” or, in the case of people who are more comfortable with an ad lib, “Fabulous! I mean, yes, great!”
I had a great weekend enjoying some great weather and felt grateful that I didn’t have a driveway full of snow to shovel (though I’m sure the plow drivers in the Works Department will import some from Antarctica just to dump in the end of my driveway as they’ve done every morning since October). The warm sun and fresh air made me take a moment to pause and marvel at the wonder of nature and let the joy of a bright sky and a soft breeze remind me of simpler days. I expressed these feelings to my neighbour.
“Great day!” I said.
“Great!” he replied.
We all had a great time in the neighbourhood hauling out rakes and filling plastic trash bags with leaves that avoided the fall clean-up. Under the leaves we found what appeared to be most of the Gobi Desert, left here by all that sand the works crew dumped on the roads all winter while we sat at Tim Hortons and said, “Wonder when they’re gonna sand the roads.”
We raked the sand and gravel from our grass. We raked it pretty hard. It didn’t seem to be making much difference. Sure was a lot of sand there.
“Sure beats shoveling snow,” someone said.
“Yeah,” I said, but I’m not sure how.
Then we shoveled the dirt into little piles around the edges of our lawns as we all thought, I’m certain, “Great #@&$ing day!”
Then we stared at the dirt piles, wondering what to do with them. Some of us started raking them back onto our lawns, hoping the dirt would just disappear the same way Girl Guide cookie crumbs seem to disappear into my carpet.
With the spring chores all done - other than some minor items on the to-do list such as scraping and painting the deck, installing a gate and re-trellising the arboreum - I could turn my thoughts to leisure activities such as mowing the lawn, cleaning out the garage and de-horneting the attic.
In my spare time, I like to think about taking my hammock down out of the rafters of my garage. I don’t actually plan to do it because my back will be too sore from shoveling road sand but I like to think about it.
In another spare moment I went to a meeting at the school for parents whose children play on the varsity rugby team. My daughter plays half scrum forward (if you know rugby, please don’t ruin this for me. I’m trying to fake my way through and we both know it) and as such has the important job of trying to play the entire game without losing the use of any organs that may be important to her some day, such as her head.
I’ve been a rugby parent for three seasons now and I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of what looks, on the surface, like a violent, almost barbaric game in which players try to pound each other into tofu. In truth, rugby is a complex sport in which players try to ground a ball in the opposition’s in-goal area (called “scoring a try”) while the opposition tries to tackle the ball carrier (called “pounding her into tofu”).
At the team meeting, the coach told us parents not to worry about the girls’ safety. The parents who have watched rugby before did our best to calm the fears of the parents of rookie players by offering reassuring advice such as get her a mouth guard so her teeth won’t get knocked into her lungs, don’t let her wear earrings (or any other kind of rings) or she could lose a body part and consider duct-taping her ears to her head. It’s just a precaution.
No one, the coach assured us, has ever lost an ear on his watch. (Oh, don’t wear a watch either. Hate to see a girl lose her corsage hand right before prom).
If a player does get injured, the team has a crack medical staff at the ready including, but not limited to, a vice-principal and someone who once worked at a Shopper’s Drug Mart. Together they should be equipped to handle any emergency. For minor bumps and bruises, I have a load of ice coming any time now, straight from Antarctica.