For the past couple of weekends, we have been digging up plants in our backyard and bringing them to our rental home.  It is a lot of work and we will never be able to save everything.

But, I just cannot bare the thought of my plants being bulldozed to their death.  Months ago I called our landscaper who did our backyard and asked him how much it would cost to dig everything up and he said it wouldn’t be worth the cost.  He wouldn’t be able to guarentee they would live and in the end it is cheaper to buy new plants.

That left us no choice for the plants.  We had to dig them up.  The trees and the shrubs will not be so lucky.  There is no way we can dig up those.

I woke up this morning and could barely get out of bed.  I really over did it this weekend.

Too much hauling and digging.

We had some help on Saturday, which was great.  We did get a lot of plants dug up.  Still a lot left.  We won’t be able to save them all.

Walking around my backyard I feel awful.  It just looks terrible.  It never looks like this.  I want to pull the weeds, I want the grass to be cut one more time and I want to rake the leaves.

Instead, we have been doing our Fall work at our rental home. It feels good to be working outside and making our rental house look nice.

It is exhausting, both mentally and physically.  Between hockey, swimming, soccer and an urgent care visit yesterday, it is amazing what we are getting done.

I noticed something odd today while getting ready for work.  I looked out the bathroom window and I saw our towering Pine tree that is just outside our backdoor and noticed that one of it’s limbs was almost touching our old Oak tree.  It looked like they were holding hands.

Then I went outside and saw that another limb on the Pine tree was reaching toward a younger Maple tree on another side.  It’s like they know of their upcoming fate.

The old Oak tree was here before the house was built in 1938, so it has to be close to a hundred years old.  The towering Pine that must be about a hundred feet tall was not in the photos when the home was built, but was here in the sixties.  I would say somewhere between fifty and seventy five years old.

The Maple was small when we purchased the house fifteen years ago.  I would guess under thirty years and closer to twenty something.

I am going to miss all of them.  Especially the towering Pine.  Over the years we have named the tree “the Pee tree”.

I have boys, I don’t think I need to explain how we came to name it.

~Susan