‘I think we should’ve started this when we were 10 bloody years younger!’ she says, brandishing the sledgehammer and chisel she’s been using for hours to chip away at the bricked wall of the in-ground fishpond in the back yard.
‘You’re not wrong there,’ I say. ‘Clearly we built it to last. We’d have no trouble finding jobs as brickies on the Great Wall of China.’
It had been a straight forward enough project at the outset – or so it seemed. The fishpond had to come out – it was a lot of work to keep it clean, the neighbourhood flock of domestic pigeons had found it as a water source and were pooping all over the yard, and we were only going to find it harder and harder to maintain as we got older. Then it would just be a matter of filling in the hole and planting a few more shrubs. We could do this.
So we’d emptied the pond, detached the pump and removed the fibreglass shell quite easily. But we’d forgotten that in an earlier iteration the pond had been much larger with a three-brick high edge that we’d buried and hidden in the garden. It would have to come out too. If you were going to do a job, you needed to do it properly.
Many muttered expletives, barked knuckles, testy exchanges and five days later, the last two pieces of brick and cement footings finally yielded to our efforts.
Now we were on the downhill run. All that remained was to lift and remove the slate pavers that had bordered the pond. But the sandstone garden bench, which was to go too, was sitting on some of the pavers and we couldn’t lift it. No worries. We can push it over into the hole out of the way. We’ll have to get someone to come and collect it and the brick and cement rubble anyway.
We lift the pavers only to discover that we had very properly bedded them in gravel. Another job – the gravel has to be hand sieved to separate it from the surrounding soil. Then there’s the pump power cable to be dug up and removed. We’d forgotten that too. Finally it’s done.
We survey our handiwork.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘I’ve always regretted that we didn’t include an area of lawn in our back yard when we designed it. Maybe we could have some lawn?’
‘You mean in the space we’ve cleared, instead of more shrubs?‘
‘No. I’d like a really decent-sized stretch of lawn, say from the garage up to just short of the raised vegetable beds. It would open up the area so much more and give us better space for entertaining, too. And the garden we’d have to maintain would be so much smaller – much less weeding to do.’
‘Dig up all of the rest of the shrubs! What would we do with them? Surely not chuck them out? We’d have to dismantle the drippers again too. And we’d have to buy a mower. And who’d mow it?’
‘I know, I know, but just imagine the feel of soft and cool lawn under your feet in summer.’
‘Well… I suppose I could live with that,’ she says.
‘Good, well let’s get stuck into it. And don’t worry about the mowing – I rather fancy a turn at being the neighbourhood nuisance who gets up at bloody 7.30am on Sundays to mow their lawn!’
Burnside Writers Group 