Brush and Trash

a "slice" of the side "yard"

I spent four and a half hours yesterday picking up trash from around the barn, burning brush, picking up fallen branches, and pruning. I really should have been correcting the week's school work, and working on my upcoming lesson plan. But the sun was out, it was above freezing, my littlest two were tucked in for a nap (for the first hour and a half), and I needed to get out of the house.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the last owners left an unsightly mess strewn about. I wanted to collect some of it before the grass starts growing and it's hidden again. Now I know all about farm garbage and random broken stuff. Our last place was an old one, and I've not lived in a city for over 12 years. At our last home I would uncover clouded glass medicine bottles, rusted bits of iron, old shoe leathers, etc.  That would be when I was turning over earth for planting or something. And the farm garbage most folks have is rusty machinery and the like. At this place I pick up things like articles of clothing with grass growing through them, plastic storage containers full of nasty water, food wrappers, full drink containers buried under matted grass, blister packs of medicine, broken pens, small plastic toys, torn up glove parts, and many balls.

daffodils have been showing since before Christmas

So I headed to an area between the woods and the barn and gathered up a 30 gallon trash bag of garbage so that we could mow that area this year. Besides, I didn't want to walk through tall grass and step on a deflated football filled with putrid water again. When I did that last year, for at least a split-second I thought I had stepped on a dead animal. I was relieved to learn otherwise, but still disgusted.

After trash duty I headed for the brush pile. One of the reasons that I wanted to burn it was that it was because it was already taller than I was, and I needed to burn our 8 ft. tall Christmas tree that had been blowing around the side yard. Out here in rural America there is no garbage pick-up, let alone tree collection. Heck, my county's recycling center doesn't even take glass! So unless I wanted to sully up one of our gullies, I needed to burn the thing.

Seeing as it has rained a great deal here in the last few weeks and the ground was a sodden mess, it was the perfect time to burn, at least from my paranoid perspective. (I have a mildly inordinate fear of needles, knives, and fire. My healthy fear of fire has kicked up a notch now that the fire ring is sandwiched between the woods and the hay field.) When I finally burned down the brush pile, I walked the side and back yard and picked up the many branches that had fallen from the tulip and maple trees and threw them on too, only to have a pile as big as I started with.

our old home's sunroom

Once that burnt down, I threw on the Christmas tree. It wasn't nearly as impressive as the blazes of old. Our old 1850's home had the characteristic high ceilings, so our trees were bigger. It was a truly impressive sight to see a nearly 10 ft. tall tree go up in flames when it was reflected in every window of the sunroom like the facets of an over-sized diamond. It made it appear as though our house was on fire. Our old neighbor, Mr. Berresford, who hailed from England originally, once came over to give me a humorous piece of his mind  (as he was frequently wont to do) for starting a blaze so high that he could see it over our house! But then, he was once scolded by an old woman who was a previous owner of our old home for burning carpet on a stump and smoking everyone out with petrochemical fumes. So I didn't feel bad, and took his good-natured ribbing in stride. 30 odd acres of wooded privacy prohibits such neighborly interaction now. I miss Mr. B., but I am learning to enjoy our new privacy too.

nearing the end of the burn

Once the tree burned down, which was pretty quickly, I hacked down some wickedly thorny Autumn Olives from around a couple trees to facilitate easier mowing this spring.  Of course, I burned them too. After that, my husband came out and hauled over all the limbs that someone had been throwing under a big tree on the edge of the hay field. He didn't want them to obstruct haying again this year. So the brush pile was again as big as when I started.

the nearly-full moon that I saw rise

But in the end I got it all burnt down, minus a limb that requires a chain saw. That will have to wait for another day. And there was some diversion. I overturned a stone in the fire ring to reset it and uncovered a shiny-eyed deer mouse that stared at me. Another stone in the ring exploded several times with loud reports once the fire got really hot. I saw the moon rise over the tree line. (It looked like a transparent slice of turnip.) I watched the sun set behind the woods.... and filter through all the smoke. And in the end, the grounds are starting to look better.