Nature can be tempered, controlled and used to great advantage or negative impact. But, deep down we know that nature will ultimately just do what she does.
I’m waging an internal war with the tree next door. It flicks its tiny leaves like confetti into our yard. Confetti that gets between your toes and into that crease in your elbow and onto your hair. The leaves land in our pool and cover the surface like abstract art. Except that it isn’t.
We took to that tree like excited hairdressers a year ago. Well, the aborists did. They spent hours cutting back the heavy branches that were reaching over into our space. The tree is huge. A monster tree that is older than our pool and probably older than me. It reaches into the sky and over our fence and into the sky above our pool.
Yes, I did feel like a nature-hating, non-tree hugging, mean person. But trimming branches wasn’t going to hurt anyone. And for a while we enjoyed not having to clean our pool and yard as often. And there was more sunlight, for a bit.
Then the branches grew back and fast.
I’m still waging my war, but I can’t go through all of that chopping and calming the neighbour and paying a lot of money again. I have decided to turn my pool and pavement cleaning into furious exercise. I read somewhere that housework burns calories and I’m not talking the flick with a feather duster kind of housework. After I’ve swept and grunted and swept and scooped, the pool and yard look good – until the next couple of days when the hundreds and thousands float down from the sky.
Having said all of this, I’m grateful there’s not an apartment block next door or as Joni Mitchell so beautifully sung, they haven’t ‘paved paradise and put up a parking lot’…. Not yet anyway.
Nature will have her way. And even though generations upon generations haven’t often been thoughtful or kind or considerate to her, she finds a way through. For now.
Most of us won’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone.
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