Trash Talk

Today the grass turned green. The daffodils bloomed. Barry Sanders the whistlepig was rooting around the back yard. Mike Kelley was pacing down by the river. When he saw me at the trash bins he nearly ran over to me, arms and legs swinging wildly to maximize speed. As usual, he told me what a great job I was doing with the invasive removal. And as usual, he dove straight in to offer advice in the art of ‘lolipopping’ these trees. ‘Using natural tools such as my hands or sticks, I prune the buckthorne to make vertical lines so that you can see the natural landscape,’ says Mike, advising me to do the same, and, above all else, consider the job an art project, the forest my canvas. He also reminded me to always remove the cut brush. ‘I find that as I remove the dead, living things replace them.’ I found this an interesting thing for Mike Kelley to say the day before Easter, and considered saying something like ‘I find that the living things rise out of the dead.’ I thought better of it, for there were only about four hours of daylight remaining. If you want to get into a discussion about life, death, Catholicism, and honeysuckle with Mike, you better start talking in the morning or else you will end up breaking the ‘open dawn to dusk’ rule.