Labor Day Weekend

I spent time yesterday and today taking out the Halloween decorations and arranging black cats, smiling witches, and happy pumpkins all over the inside of the house. We are ready for Halloween..... the outside doesn't get decorated at all except for a few ceramic pumpkins here and there around the yard.

We don't get trick-or-treating kids out here... and what's the sense of putting outside decorations up when the end result is nesting wasps and bees and mounds of fire ants. So thank you, but no thank you.... I keep the decorations inside the house and that's that.  Invitations are made for our Halloween party next month, and until then, we get to enjoy the happy/friendly faces of the cats and witches and pumpkins. (No horrible Halloween here... it's all happy, happy, happy.)

Handyman R was here today.... he spent some hours pulling up weeds and cleaning out flowerbeds. The previous owner of this property was either a gardening saint or a gardening martyr..... way too many decorative flowerbeds around this house, considering that rainfall up here in the hills is not exactly normal or even remotely regular.  I keep thinking of our small yard back in Clear Lake, with the so-convenient sprinkling system that came on after midnight and kept everything green and watered and growing so nicely.  Out here in the hills, growing anything at all seems to always be such a challenge. (And for someone who doesn't like the dirt, the ants, the spiders, the scorpions... it's more than a challenge... it's a nightmare of the utmost proportions.)

With that in mind.... I called the father/son landscaping duo that we used to have here before my husband bought the riding mower.  I spoke to the son (who is now in his third year of college) and asked him if his family would know anyone who would be interested in taking the apartment over our barn in exchange for taking care of the landscaping on our property.  Seems like such a great exchange... someone who loves to cut grass and pull weeds and plant flowers..... they get the apartment, we get the work done. (Without having to wait for handyman R to pull into our driveway at nearly noon when we expected him to be here by nine o'clock in the morning.)

So... we'll see what happens... I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  My hopes are high right now because I just finished reading one of the memoirs of Beverley Nichols.... he had a very old home in the English countryside that came with its own gardener, Mr. Oldfield.   For nearly 40 years, Oldfield took care of growing, cutting, mowing, planting, trimming, pruning, weeding, seeding, fertilizing, watering.... whatever was to be done in the gardens, Oldfield did it.  The man worked from morning till night and loved it all as if it were his own..... and stopped working in his mid-80s only because his body just couldn't do the work any longer.

Now.... I'm not looking for someone to work from sun-up till sun-down until they're 85.... but it would be very nice to have someone to just take care of things outside without having to be told what to do and when to do it.... and my wish would be for that person to really enjoy the work, and the 'free' apartment.

In my dreams... only in my dreams... and in the books of Beverley Nichols.