A Tale of Two Cities

CITY #1: DICKINSON, ND

After spending months getting ready for the first summer orientation session for incoming students (and their parents) to our university, I am happy to say that it's over as of yesterday afternoon (. . . and now we have to start getting ready for the next session in three weeks . . .). I spent yesterday afternoon into evening and all morning and afternoon today doing yard work, including mowing and trimming the lawn and planting several plants that Beverly had us take home from her flower beds on our last visit: ten peonies around our back yard and ten day lilies and five irises in the flower bed on the west side of our house. I also weeded and worked the soil in all the flower beds around the house and around the bushes, and I put in a decorative concrete border to replace a rotting wooden one by the shed in the back yard.

We've got house guests coming for a visit this week, so--wanting everything to look neat and tidy--I trimmed the sprawling evergreen ground cover shrubs at either end of the driveway and then, exhausted, came inside to shower. Susan's dad, Roger, had brought his own mom, Susan's grandma Laura, over for coffee after church, and while they were here, Susan and I had mentioned that we intended someday to remove those ugly, tangled shrubs and replace them with perennials. After dropping off Laura at the nursing home, Roger decided to surprise us by showing up to help us with that chore.

Unfortunately, it was just after I had showered and sat down to rest every aching muscle in my body after two days of yard work. Added drawback of doing this just two days before our guests arrive: what to do with the shrubbery debris before Tuesday (P.S. garbage pick-up day here is Thursday)? and how to find time to buy and plant perennials to replace the shrubs before Tuesday (P.S. I work all day tomorrow, and Susan has a nighttime meeting to attend)? The best laid plans . . . sigh.

Well, one doesn't say "no" to free labor, so I got dressed again, and Roger used his pruning shears to clip away at the tangled mat of decades-old underlying branches beneath the prickly, overgrown surface of green and brown while I lifted branches to give him access and then tossed the branches onto a steadily growing and unmanageable pile on the driveway as we got closer and closer to the main stump of the shrub and its recalcitrant network of roots shooting both outward and downward into our yard. The cold wind blew relentlessly; intermittent rain showers soaked us; and the grid of bloody scratches along both my arms widened and lengthened as we worked. The root ball defied my spade and refused to budge for the longest time, but eventually we got it out and took a moment to catch our breaths. In just a couple hours, we had finished with ONE of the two shrubs.

Roger and I went to work on the other side of the driveway while Susan and the girls picked up the plastic sheeting and lava rocks that had once served as decoration around the shrub when it was first planted but which have long since been buried beneath the canopy of the shrubs and thick layers of brown, rotting evergreen needles. The second shrub's root ball would not come out until we tied it to the back bumper of the Explorer and pulled it out that way. Then Roger blasted off, leaving us with another mess of plastic sheeting and lava rocks and two towering piles of shrubbery branches swaying in the wind . . . and house guests coming in two days. We got the shrubbery aftermath crammed into the back of the Explorer and parked it in the driveway; Susan and Suzanna will haul it away tomorrow. We finished picking up the lava rocks and plastic sheeting, and I worked and smoothed the soil; we won't have any flowers or plants in place by Tuesday, but at least it will look tidy.


CITY #2: OMAHA, NE

Yesterday my sister Sandy went to Wichita, KS for our cousin JoAnn's daughter Sandi's wedding. While Sandy was there last night, a tornado went through her neighborhood back in Omaha, and she got an unpleasant phone call from a friend asking her whether she'd heard about the tornado. Sandy returned home today to survey the damage. It could have been much worse; her house is still standing with minimal damage inside, at least. However, there is a lot of exterior damage to her roof, her siding, her windows, her fence, her front porch, her central air unit, and her yard and trees. This is what her house looked like last week:

And here it is now:

That's her neighbor's tree in Sandy's driveway.

Another angle of the tree in the driveway/against the house.

Fence damage.

That's Sandy's tree (scroll back up to see it upright in her front yard last week) on top of her neighbor's pickup in his driveway.

Curbside debris from the cleanup.

Sandy has recently been doing a lot of work to her house, including interior painting that has now been affected by water damage and exterior landscaping projects that have now been ripped out. I may complain about sore muscles and having to haul away dead branches, but that's nothing compared to having to clean up after a natural disaster. (Susan and I survived a major flood a decade ago, so we know from disaster cleanup and recuperation.)

Send Sandy your positive thoughts, and check out her blog for updates on the situation in Omaha.