This past weekend I helped my parents with some gardening and yard work.  It was a lot of fun, surprisingly.  Or not so surprisingly, I guess.  I’ve always liked doing work outside–mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway, etc.  Being outside, side by side with my dad, doing some hard manual labor always made me feel more useful than being inside vacuuming or dusting.  But that’s another topic for another day.

On Sunday we worked together to first trim the bushes.  I used a trimmer to make sure all of them were perfectly rounded and flat on the top.  I felt like I was back in ceramics, smoothing out all the bumps on a newly spun pot.  It was nice to fashion it with my own hands.  Anyway, after that finished we had to cut up one of the trees in our yard that was having an identity crisis.

I say this because when we first bought the tree so many years ago all of its branches were growing downward.  It’s a crabapple tree, so its branches droop downward.  I guess that downward growth was forced by man when it was just a little tree, so now that it’s growing up, it’s starting to rebel just a bit.  A few of the branches on the top are growing straight up!  It looks like the tree is vomitting new green leaves.  Unfortunately for it, as healthy as the branches were, we called over Usman uncle and his chain saw to cut the new branches all of.  Sorry tree, but pain is beauty.

Anyway, with all the trees and bushes trimmed up and pretty, I noticed that our yard was still missing something… flowers!  So yesterday when I went with ammi to Randazzo’s, we picked up some flowers and brought them back home.  In the afternoon I went oustide to plant them. (more…)