I'm really not sure what day it is, what year it is. When I drove around this evening, I traveled through time more than I did through space. Memories of my youth were coming at me so strongly, clearly. I could have sworn that this evening it was the night of Christmas, and I was a passenger with my older cousins, driving around in Oklahoma City, bored, after the holiday gatherings were winding down. I could hear my oldest cousin criticizing my immature taste in music, I could see incandescent, colored lights twinkling through frosted car windows, and I felt young, with the entire promise of my life still ahead. All this from the way the light was striking old red brick houses, from old songs playing on the 70s channel, from the heat coming out of the car vents. Then, to confuse my sense of time and space even further, I pushed myself into the future, to starting out as a fledgling real estate agent, getting to take people through all of these houses I was zooming past. I pictured myself going into those pretty brick houses that intrigue me, shaking snow off my boots before I enter a house, getting to satisfy my curiosity about the view from the other side of the windows.
I can be rather flighty and fickle, and my opinions about what sort of house I'd like to have change with the seasons. I will get to house hunt for years, without ever having to pack up a single cardboard box. I'll get to pretend I'm buying one of these places for me, and in my mind, I'll get to arrange furniture, repaint walls, rip out carpeting. Yet I will never have to expend the effort to do any of it. I just get to have fifteen minute fantasies while my clients are doing the same thing with much more on the line. What fun this is going to be. Don't spoil my good mood by reminding me how much work it will be to make a living in this business, driving and touring and writing contracts and making more phone calls than my socially awkward mouth can stand. I'm choosing to anticipate the good things and gloss over the hard parts right now.
I never imagined that a yard as small as the one I have now would be as much work as it is. While the Mr was putting up another eight feet of fencing this afternoon, I started hacking away at one of the giant columns of intertwined clematis and Virginia creeper. I hate cutting down flowers I like while they are still actively blooming, but I know for certain that growing weather is coming to an end, possibly as soon as tomorrow. It is going to take us a long time to get the three clematis towers cut down to the base and dug up. We're moving them to the back fence, so that some day we can renovate the back patio. Some of our projects are years in the future, like the patio, but the (literal) ground work has to be laid now. Soon Murray will have a clearer shot at his back door, without tangling vines grabbing his wheels, and that's the best reason to start now with these plants. No one has maintained them in years, and as I snipped and pulled, I uncovered a mess that just ended up looking like a giant bird nest, one big enough for me to sit in. I promised myself that from now on, I'll cut them to the ground every year. It will pay big dividends to invest a little time in them then, but I have a large downpayment to make on them right now.
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