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The Fence
My backyard neighbors are an apartment complex, so there's a pretty robust privacy fence along their rear property line. They put up a new one about eight years back, and instead of tearing down the old shitty one, they just built their new one like four inches in from it, leaving the shitty one up for me, my next-door neighbor, and the feral lot on the other side of us.
I spent the weekend trying to suss out what of it is usable as a trellis for the pole beans I'll be planting soon, and I came to the conclusion that most of it wasn't that bad, except for the last section on the southern edge of the property. I spent two hours this afternoon ripping that ten-foot long section out with my bare hands and a little crowbar, and not only does that patch of yard now look a million times better, but the rest of the fence looks so much less shitty without that section dragging it off kilter that it's not even funny. I'm going to anchor it to the newer fence sometime this week to give it more stability, but it doesn't really need it anymore.
Of course, there now being only one fence instead of two fences means you can kind of see through the gap a little, so it was fun to spend two hours getting glimpses of movement on the other side of the fence, someone stopping and contemplating the shaking plants and the sounds of wood breaking and the occasional rustle of the bins getting moved around and then just deciding it wasn't their fucking business and they did not need this right now. Because the thing about brittle, old planks breaking is that it's loud. So there's morning glory vine disappearing over the fence and through cracks in the fence like mad, and then there's a noise like the fucking Kool-Aid Man is kicking his way through the fence, and then you decide that you just don't want to know and walk faster.
I still have more work to do before I can plant anything I need to keep an eye on, but I have at least a week before I have to worry about it, too. The beans are sprouting, but they're at that like neonate stage where they haven't even gotten their leaves out of the ground yet--they're just germinating.
I spent the weekend trying to suss out what of it is usable as a trellis for the pole beans I'll be planting soon, and I came to the conclusion that most of it wasn't that bad, except for the last section on the southern edge of the property. I spent two hours this afternoon ripping that ten-foot long section out with my bare hands and a little crowbar, and not only does that patch of yard now look a million times better, but the rest of the fence looks so much less shitty without that section dragging it off kilter that it's not even funny. I'm going to anchor it to the newer fence sometime this week to give it more stability, but it doesn't really need it anymore.
Of course, there now being only one fence instead of two fences means you can kind of see through the gap a little, so it was fun to spend two hours getting glimpses of movement on the other side of the fence, someone stopping and contemplating the shaking plants and the sounds of wood breaking and the occasional rustle of the bins getting moved around and then just deciding it wasn't their fucking business and they did not need this right now. Because the thing about brittle, old planks breaking is that it's loud. So there's morning glory vine disappearing over the fence and through cracks in the fence like mad, and then there's a noise like the fucking Kool-Aid Man is kicking his way through the fence, and then you decide that you just don't want to know and walk faster.
I still have more work to do before I can plant anything I need to keep an eye on, but I have at least a week before I have to worry about it, too. The beans are sprouting, but they're at that like neonate stage where they haven't even gotten their leaves out of the ground yet--they're just germinating.