Clip Me Baby One More Time

Britney did it with her hair. This weekend, I did it with some shrubs in our front yard.

It all started with the arrival last Thursday of four hydrangea plants my mother-in-law had shipped to me (which was a significant thing in and of itself).

I am not a gardener. Growing up I was a suburban girl living an urban existence. I left tooling around in the yard to my parents--my dad landscaping in the front, and my mom tending to her raised vegetable garden in the back.

It's not that I don't appreciate the beauty of a well-tended garden, and the bounty it yields. My main aversion to gardening is happening upon squirmy worms when you're disturbing their natural habitat--it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Or at least it did when I was six years old watching my dad till soil. I haven't looked back since.

But when my mother-in-law, an avid gardener, started sharing her wisdom earlier this year with me around this area of her interest, I took the time to really listen to her. The conversations were seeming to nurture a new bond.

And then the plants came this Thursday. Live plants.

Well, I tell you what--I determined that best believe I was going to become a gardener this weekend, because I was NOT, given all the literal and symbolic importance of the gift of these hydrangea plants, going to be the one who'd have to put explaining their demise to my mother-in-law on my future to-do list.

So I got to thinking that the front of our house might be a nice place for them if it weren't for the unsightly half-dead shrubs, long serving as the bane of my existence, that were currently occupying the space.

Standing in the driveway looking at these shrubs the thought popped into my head: "They must go... they must go NOW."

And before I knew it, I was out there, looking like the best dressed gardener ever in my good "street clothes" and new shoes, cutting away at these shrubs with manual hedge clippers of my father's that we'd been storing for him in our basement.

Hubby-Honey was inside with the children watching the near completion of Ohio State vs. Georgetown Final Four game before he noticed that whatever I'd said I'd be doing outside (I wasn't specific) was taking a REALLY long time.

And that's when he found me, in the midst of green and browned clippings, grunting like Serena Williams returning a volley and hacking away at the shrubs that were now down to their thick bark-like limbs (that were no match for the clippers, so at this point I was just swinging the tool at them as if I could will it to now act as an axe).

I stopped at that point, because I could hear it in his voice when he questioned, "Uh, Babe...? Are you... OK...?" that I was scaring him.

I was fine. But I took out all that wasn't right with the world on those shrubs. And it did feel good.

Sunday, I was seven kinds of sore, but I got out there again (this time in proper "old clothes" gardening attire) and lawn-bagged up the clippings and branches. Hubby-Honey went to Lowe's and bought a "pick mattock", and finished the job--save for one last "shrub nud" whose roots run too deep for us to play with.

So like Britney, I'll be calling in a professional to clean up my impetuous mess, but unlike Britney, I'm clean and sober and didn't have to plop down $25,000+ and 30 days of my life for the therapeutic shedding.

But I think I might understand where she may have been coming from, so those who are venturing into glass greenhouses don't throw stones.

Satisfaction over a job (maybe half-crazily) well (almost) done, a newfound curb appeal and urge to garden, and Ma, for the hydrangea, you've just been added to The Thanks Ranks.

Smith and Hawken, here I come!