Ravin's Ramblings

It’s been a hell of a week. It started out with torrential down pours spoiling my yard work plans, then getting puked on by my two-year-old, followed by several days of cleaning up what said two-year-old has named “sphincter soup”. The cats are on a litter box protest because through a completely random incident involving Red Box and a movie I STILL haven’t returned, my husband went to VA for the week with my ATM card. I’ve been feeding them dog food for the last two days and they’ve been showing their appreciation for being rescued from the animal shelter and quite possible euthanization by leaving big steaming piles IN FRONT of their litter box. I suppose I could just suck it up and write a check…but wait…the ENTIRE box of checks has gone missing (last seen in the hands of Mr. Sphincter Soup).

Yesterday was sunny and beautiful and gorgeous. And I spent all afternoon with my son outside. We played hop-scotch and we watered the cedar bushes, and we picked beautiful flowers (See a boo-foh fower, mumma? See a fower?), and we drew pictures with sidewalk chalk. And then the landscapers showed up at my neighbor’s house and took out their cedar bushes. Huh, seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through landscapers to pull up a few bushes. And I looked at my cedar “shrubs” (which after two years of neglect are each roughly the size of a minivan) and I remembered all the nice little packages I have from Henry Fields just waiting to be planted in the ground. I bet I could pull those out. How hard could it be?

So, I pulled out the electric hedge trimmers and went to town. Let me just say that although electric hedge trimmers look like a little chain saw…it is not, in fact, a chain saw. And in round 1 of Melissa vs. the cedar shrubs, the shrubs won. Now, the front lawn is covered in tree shrapnel, I’m sweaty and gross, and the shrubs are not really looking any worse for wear. Time to regroup. I needed a saw.

I needed a saw but what I had was a multi-tool. Maybe if I went one branch at a time…it would still take me until Christmas to cut the darn things out and I’d still have the root problem to contend with. Round two of Melissa vs. the cedar shrubs goes to the shrubs.

What would I do if I were still living in the country? Well, for starters, any rural Iowan worth their salt would have a chainsaw. Since I am no longer a rural Iowan, and my hedge trimmers could never be mistaken for a chainsaw, I decided to hook a chain around the shrub and pull it out with my car. I’ve seen tree stumps pulled out of ground by tractors before. Surely a few overgrown cedar shrubs would pose no problem.

By the time I’d backed my car up on to the front lawn and hooked the neon orange ratchet straps around the base of the shrub (did I mention no chain either) and secured the other end to the frame of my car I’d gathered an audience. Great. Half my neighbors were on their front lawns gawking at the crazy lady in her husband’s tennis and welder’s gloves. Not wanting to look like a bigger ass than I already did, I go into the house to get a second opinion.

“Is Dad there?” I ask my mom.

“Nope,” she tells me in her Yooper accent, “He’s gone mushrooming with Jerry Andresen.”

“Damn.”

“What’s a matter?” and when I tell her the story, she says “Gees oh Pete, why don’t you just dig it out?” Dig it out? Right. Had she not seen these shrubs??? I have to be able to get to it first and right now the blood dripping down my arm and spiders in my hair is enough not to make me want to go anywhere near it with a shovel.

“Do you think the car thing will work?” I ask her.

“Worth a try.” She tells me, “But why don’t you wait until your husband is home, this is sort of a man’s job anyway.” Because I’m an independent woman who can handle things on her own and I am not going to admit defeat to a cedar shrub, that’s why! I thank her for her words of encouragement, go out and start up the car.

See, there’s a problem with that. The 1.8L of my adorable little girly Nissan Cube doesn’t quite have the same power of a ‘65 Farmall. It started to work. The shrub was coming up slowly but surely, teasing me, getting my hopes up. And then the wheels on my car began to spin. And no matter what angel I tried it from, the damn shrubs refused to be uprooted. The crowd of onlookers had grown since my conversation with my mother. None of them were offering a chain saw…or a ’65 farmall.

I turned off the engine, went out, inspected the damage. Roughly ¼ of the shrub had been pulled out of the ground, the rest held firm. With a sigh, I unhooked the ratchet strap. With what little dignity I had left, I gathered up the welding gloves, slipped my bare feet back into my husband’s size 12’s, put the car back into the drive and inspected the shallow ruts I’d left on my front lawn. Disappointed that the show was over, the neighbors went back to their yard work and lawn mowing and I thought about how embarrassing this was and that really, what good is having a husband if he can’t even pull out a few cedar shrubs for me. I decided to call my mom back.

“Epic fail.” I told her and hung up.

UPDATE: After a Redbull and a shower, I decided to try a different strategy using the ratchet straps and the car. Instead of taking the entire thing out at once, I decided to do it in pieces. You'll be thrilled to know, it worked like a charm. That baby popped out like grease from a skillet. First one of you smart alecks to tell me how I should have done it gets an uprooted cedar shrub and tire marks on your front lawn.