A couple of months ago, the back yard was a wilderness. Ok.  Not a wilderness.  But it was carpeted with a solid cover of leaves from autumns past, and I, quite frankly, was afraid to walk very far in it.  If I took the trash out, I tried to leap from the deck, over the flower bed, and walk the shortest line to the garbage can.

I don’t know what lurks in leaves.  I don’t know what lurks in the backyards of southern homes.  There could be snakes there, for all I know.  The last snake I saw live and in person was a garden snake when I was about 6 in Connecticut.  I’ve seen dead ones on the road here.  One of them was a poisonous one, I was told.  So my knowledge about snakes pretty much can be summed up as this: They live in the south and there’s more than just garden snakes here.  Don’t ask me what they look like, or where they live, or where they like to hang out, or where the most likely spot is to find them.  I don’t know.

Anyway.

So I didn’t go in the backyard much, because it scared me.  I decided about a month or so ago that feeling like that was fairly ridiculous.  I mean, I am 31.  I shouldn’t be afraid of the backyard.  Thus, I embarked on a ‘clean up and plant nice stuff’ project.  I managed to swing by the local nursery right as they were having a big sale to clear out the old plants for the new.  I bought hydrangeas, an azalea, a rose bush, and two other bushes that I can’t remember the names of.  Then I smiled really pretty and begged my boy to buy a new leaf blower (seriously, I’m really easy to please), I got some new shovels and a good garden rake and I was ready.

We spent one weekend about a month or so ago working on the backyard.  I got about half of the leaves blown into the burn pile, which he tended to.  It was huge.  I don’t know how we didn’t burn the neighborhood down.  He burned, and I tended to the leaves.  And then I spread some grass seed in a small portion of the backyard.

Then the rains came.  And they kept coming.

The new grass grew, but the remaining half of the leaves got soggy.  Really soggy.  This past week, we’ve had a strech of dry days, and considering temperatures are starting to creep into the 90’s here (and I’m a total freaking wimp when it comes to the heat here), I figured it was now or November to get the leaves up.  So I did.  I spent the better part of the day today getting the rest of the leaves up, and seeing where the remaining bare spots are.  More grass seed will get purchased and spread – tomorrow, most likely – and then operation “Make the yard pretty” will be complete.  Well, until the leaves fall again.

But I’ve got my super duper leaf blower for that!

Now the backyard is cleaned out, and it looks nice.  Two of the hydrangea bushes are blooming with a fervor.  Two more are a little behind, but one sprouted a tiny bud recently.  The azalea bloomed, and is now just growing.  The rose bush is doing fabulous – it was promised to bloom through fall, and it keeps growing and blooming.  An autumn sage was recently purchased, so it’s little, but I have faith it will catch up.

This all makes me so happy.  I realized today that I might just be *that* person – the person that LIKES to work in the yard.  The person who takes pride when it looks nice.  The person who might just be slightly anal about it.

So get off my lawn.