A few weeks ago, I spent the day with Crazy Aunt helping out at a food bank. It's something she does every so often and I've always wanted to go with her but we could never coordinate our schedules so that it worked out. While we were there, she told me about this woman she's become friendly with over the last year or so. This woman has a daughter and her reason for turning to the food bank was because she just got out of an abusive marriage and is trying to get back on her feet. For awhile, they were living in a shelter and then moved to an apartment while she saved up to buy a house. A co-worker of hers flips houses on the side and offered her a foreclosure property he'd bought dirt cheap a few months ago. It's in pretty good condition on the inside and has room for mom, daughter and, eventually, a dog. But the outside isn't really great. The yard has potential but right now it's full of all kinds of weeds and she obviously doesn't have any yard equipment or money to fix anything up. She came in to get food while Crazy Aunt and I were working and her story struck a bit of a chord with me. I offered to fix up the yard myself and pay for all the materials and she seemed overwhelmed. She accepted the offer and whenever I find time in my schedule, I head out to do a little bit more work on the house. It'll probably take into the fall to get it all done since I have to do it in phases (for both monetary and travel reasons), but so far it's coming along okay.
I told a friend that I was doing great right now and that I'd just come in from working outside and the reply was, "lol Wait, what? You hate yard work.". Yes. Yes I do. I hate it with a fiery passion, in fact. I get hives on my arms from being in the sun too long, my allergies go crazy from being around the weeds and I have an intense dislike of all things insects. If there's one place where I'm a diva, it's when I have to do yard work. I didn't have to do much of it as a kid, not until high school anyway, because my uncles always took care of that stuff. But then we moved and my brother and I had to tend to the yard. Then, I moved to where I had no yard specifically so I wouldn't have to tend to a yard and that's been working out okay for me. It's odd actually...if it's my own yard I have to work on, I get annoyed and I loathe it. But doing yard projects that help others, I kinda dig that. I've done a good amount of it on my trips down south and I have a lot of it ahead of me at this woman's house. I still don't like it, but I see the difference it makes to someone else and that's a beautiful thing. It makes the hives and mosquito bites and sore muscles all worth it.
