After a doctor’s appointment and a couple of errands today, I thought I could work in the yard some. The temperature was almost 70° and the sun was shining. There was also a sort of stiffish breeze. I went out with a jacket on. I noticed, as I walked into the back yard, that there were some sticks on the grass. So I went to pick them up. And, soon, I had so many that I couldn’t wrap my fingers all the way around them. I walked around to the green bins (the ones where we put the leaves and weeds and dead plants) and tossed my handful of twigs and sticks in the larger bin. I went to the back yard again, and picked up more sticks. There were sticks everywhere! The wind had been blowing at a pretty nice clip all morning, enough that any little dead end (or middling-sized dead end) of a branch, had snapped right off and tumbled down into the yard.
There were sticks in the grass, sticks in the garden, and sticks in the back part of the yard where I’m trying to get Asian Jasmine to grow (on the north-ish side at the back) and sticks in the thyme garden (on the south-ish side at the back). It seemed as though the ends of many of the limbs on the trees, an old, large pecan tree and a much younger, but still pretty large, crepe myrtle tree, were small enough to easily snap right off under the unrelenting breeze. And it was, indeed, unrelenting.
I’d pick up sticks and put them in my left hand until my hand was full, and then walk over to put them in the larger green bin. I was putting leaves in the smaller bin. I kept thinking that I was done picking up little sticks. But, the wind kept on blowing. I’d walk across a part of the yard where, just a few minutes earlier, I’d picked up a handful of sticks and twigs, and, suddenly, there were just as many sticks and twigs as there had been a few minutes previously.
-
- The smaller bin is about half full with leaves.
-
- The lower part of the larger bin is also full of leaves. The larger part at the top is filled with sticks.
-
- Our back yard has a bit of a slope to it. Most of the sticks are at the lower part of the yard. The green bins are up next to the house. So I have to walk up and down that little hill to collect a handful of sticks and bring them to the bin.
And, yes, I could take the big bin down to where the sticks were, but, I kept thinking that I’d picked them all up, and then the wind would blow and more sticks would gently float down to the ground. I do have a good-sized collapsible, lightweight, green bin. I finally got that and toted it around the back yard, tossing in the various sizes of sticks and twigs.
When I, at last, emptied the collapsible bin’s contents into the large green bin, I put everything away and went back inside. I checked the weather and saw that it’s going to be just as windy on Friday as it was on Thursday. One part of me thinks that, surely, all the little ends on the twigs on the trees have already been broken off. One part of me knows better.