Always a big night for me

Thursday I get to take the garbage and recyclables out to the street for pickup. I had to leave my dear old house in the hands of strangers in 2000 for career advancement, driving patrol boats out of the ports of Tampa and Savannah, and eventually a Headquarters assignment. The house was unoccupied for the past year and a half while I drove back and forth 300 miles every week from Washington, always seeming to miss Trash Day. So, for more than seven years I lived with the feeling I could kill just to experience the serene, dull, blessed, repetitive routine of putting the cans out on the street. Simple things for simple folks.

-Phillip

Huh

I have never had a beard. Actually, I am not a real heavy-bearded kind of guy by nature nor do I have much chest hair or elsewhere ... I always wonder if there was a Native American (Cleveland Indian?) in my woodpile somewhere in the past ... and the military's rules about grooming are restrictive enough it was easiest to be completely clean-shaven. With retirement I decided just to put down the razor and walk away. All the advice I could Google said not to touch anything for at least a month to see where your natural look ends up; well, it has been six weeks. I am thinking now about the end of the year.

There have been times when the itch or tickle gets annoying but it's not too hard to find a distraction until that goes away. I have been making pitiful excuses out of habit for my ratty look, but a friend took a picture of me last week and I was startled when I saw it. Hey, that looks like a real moustache! And this is beginning to look like a real beard! I don't know why this came as a surprise. I turned 51 this month so why is this unexpected? Every day now I find when I don't say anything first nobody else says anything, either. I feel damn self-conscious like the beard is the first thing that walks into a room before I do, but people give really no reaction at all, and I stopped apologizing.
When growing your own you notice just how many other beards there are walking around, with an odd satisfaction when you find yourself thinking "that one looks like crap."

Ever since I first arrived in Yorktown for training in 1987 I pictured Patrick Henry's stand in the House of Burgesses: "Give me Liberty, or Give me Death!" which I learned as a grade-school kid. I recall General George Washington kicked British butt on the fields behind my house - literally - with the help of the young and gallant Lafayette and the wily Count de Grasse during the American Revolution. When Cuyahoga County Ohio lost or did not count hundreds of votes in a past election I told my cousin she ought to sign up to be a poll worker. Last month she reminded me this is the time of year to apply if I wanted to do so myself. I dropped off some forms at the county offices and tonight we had training on how the poll workers function as a team to conduct and verify voting. There is more to it than you might think. Democracy is hard work.

I've been sworn in as an Officer of Election. About half the poll workers I have met are fairly elderly, and on top of that Virginia is experiencing an unusually compressed election schedule. There are a lot of state and local offices on the normal ballot for November, our Congressional Representative just died so there is a Special Election in December, and Virginia has moved their 2008 Presidential Primary up to February. During my conversations with the Registrar and Chairman of the York County Board of Elections a number of my patriotic impulses and urges burst out of me, weaving in and around stories about my career in the service. I guess something hit home ... tonight I was told I have been nominated to the Board of Elections.

Huh.

I am about sick

Sitting here alone after the first full month of retirement, I find myself surrounded everywhere I look with "shit I ought to do" and get terrible down on myself for doing so little. Just how long does the retirement excuse work anyway. For about a week I have had in the nagging back of my mind that I should load the truck with some brush and scrub for a trip to the recycling center run by York County. I have a deal with myself: I take one load to be shredded and I get to buy a pickup load of hardwood mulch for $10 to bring home and cut down on the amount of mowing I need to do. This is one hell of an operation, they can deliver your topsoil or mulch with a bulldozer if you happen to need that much, it's extremely beneficial to the community with the great amount of downed trees, et cetera that this part of Virginia generates, I get an unlimited amount of dump weight allowed as a resident, the cost is a real bargain, and it's only three miles from my house (all on back roads for which my aging F-150 is grateful.)

There is a very unsightly tangle of overgrowth at the corner of my lot where in years past I had cut scrub trees down to open the depths of woods in the view from the street. There is a kind of maniacal growing tree taken residence there - cut a good size tree down and ten suckers shoot out from the stump. I have in mind not only neighborly neatness but also to extend the cedar rail fence across the entire front of my lot and to plant a dwarf orchard behind it. Yesterday FedEx delivered a pawpaw from Stark Brothers, so today finally I back the truck up and grab my sharp implements of vegan destruction intent to wreak havoc on the "back nine."

It is ugly in a hacking through the Amazon kind of way. I take a compound lopper to work on all the waist high tree suckers fair enough, they cut easily and fall where they lay, but when I grab and pull there is some type of snarley creeping vine that has its' claws wrapped around everything. Nothing is immune: lop, lop, lop, lop, grab, pull, -snarltangle- go back, slice the parasitic vines all to hell, break it free and stack the whole pile up. This vine is extremely pervasive. It has climbed on anything upright in sight and makes the leap from brush to shrub to tree wherever they meet. This thing has at times four, five, six creepers wrapped around what I have brushed down, when I yank the snakes move around under the leaf litter and never originate where I suspect they are. I don't know what this is and every once in a while I remember Virginia has some very nasty things growing here which WILL break you out in bleeding sores. But it doesn't have leaves of three, in fact, it seems to have a sort of pleasant fragrance to it freshly cut, but man is it tenacious. I am in shorts of course, wearing white socks and my work boots, and these ... these ... "things" are brushing around my ankles and it is more than a bit creepy. Plus, here's a bonus: Everything takes twice as long.

But I persevere! I am Henry Morton Stanley in Zanzabar! I hack slash and am merciless - a real weed killer. I back up the truck and admire my work for a smokewhile then proceed to load up. Even then I have another fight on my hands because nothing on the ground moves without dragging along everything on the ground, and nothing fits into the truck neatly - I have to wrap and tangle things together to get them to fit. Finally it gets done.

And then ... oh, then ...

See what I did there?

... one little branch brushes my arm like one of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree pinecones. I look closer. A dim light of recognition comes to me. And I am almost physically sick.

How many years did that grape vine struggle against the forest goliaths to fight it's way up to the sunshine, asking only for a chance to turn the light into sugar? Was it ever a cultivar, or is it somehow wild and indigenous? It certainly was low lying with no care to stake it upright or craft an arbor from which to hang. It was definitely losing the battle, having to lie low and creep around and through and up its' stronger neighbors in order to survive at all. The thickest part of what I cut was no bigger than one of my fingers. What a gallant creeper, fighting against all hope for who knows how many years - and I come out and cut it to shit.

While lopping I eventually recognized the root stock point whence all the rest of the climber came with the thought of returning later to dig it out or poison it. For now I can take some small comfort from knowing grape stock really doesn't perish from a hack job, in fact it can be healthy. And maybe over the coming years Gilbert may come back and forgive me if I work at it.

There was only the one small berry. I would have eaten it to be sure. But this one had a worm.

-Phillip