Having reluctantly come to the conclusion that I’m fighting an unwinnable war in my yard, I’ve decided a change of tactics is needed. Or maybe it’s just a change in perspective, but some kind of change is required. No matter how much I put into it, the results are negligible. So I’ve decided that the only way I can keep going is to ignore the results and do what I can, when I can.

That’s right, I’m taking an artist’s view toward my yard work, without holding out any hope that it will ever look as if an artist had anything to do with it. If I could afford to hire a full-time gardener, I would. But for now, I’ll just get out there as often as possible and pull up the dead grass and cut back the overgrowth, until the yard waste container is full for that week. Then I’ll use the mower and weed trimmer until the container has been emptied.

So there will be no “after” picture after all, because no matter how diligent I am, it never looks as if I’ve done anything. I can see it, usually, at least right after I finish. But I spent half an hour today filling the container, and the patch that I worked on not only still has a massive amount of work yet to do, but it’s also so small that you could look right past it and never notice that it’s even there.

This isn’t surrender, exactly. Well, maybe it is, but it’s not giving up. (That’s not the same thing, is it?) It’s just putting the process before the product. A real artist does that, you know. I feel that way about a lot of what I do. I don’t much care about what the cost report says about profitability, but I get some enjoyment out of creating the spreadsheet that produces the cost report. This is the same thing, only with weeds and stuff.