Early Saturday morning I am sitting at my computer going through my email when a chat message comes up. It’s my daughter, “goodmorning”
Oh, good. Someone to chat with at 6:41 in the morning. “Good Morning!”
“what are your plans this morning? I was thinking of coming over but wanted to make sure people were actually home :)”
“Mom is going to First Communion retreat till 12. I am home. Probably doing exciting things like housecleaning.”
“ok, well how about I come over and do exciting things like yard work?”
“Can I help?"
“ahuh. see you in a bit then!”
About thirty minutes later I am sitting with my daughter having breakfast and sipping coffee.
My daughter is a landscape architect/designer. Our backyard is her laboratory where she discovers which plants work best in our clay soil. It is her canvas where she paints the ideas of her imaginative soul. She comes by this artistic bent naturally. One great-grandfather was a farmer who loved the land, another was a master gardener/caretaker, and a third was a florist. Throw in a distant cousin who was an artist along with a favorite uncle who showed her the imaginative soul of his art and you have a woman who was born to paint the landscape.
Over the last few years our backyard has been painted with a variety of trees, bushes and flowers. Mother Nature does her best to make things grow and the time had come for some sculpting and trimming, some clipping and pruning. Breakfast was over; on to exciting things.
We have a good system worked out, my daughter and I. She prunes and trims, snips and clips, tossing branches and such on the ground behind her. I pick up the debris and put it into the recycle bin. For this I get a hearty, “Thanks, Dad!” This is much better than when I do the trimming and clipping and I hear, “Oh, Dad! You really pruned that bush!”
It is better for my daughter, better for me and better for the plants if my daughter clips and I pick up the clippings. She knows how to do it right. She has the touch.
This is why, after the yard work was done, I asked her to give me a haircut. I don’t have a lot of hair to begin with so not much damage can be done. So when I run the hair clippers over my head the result is not particularly good. Though I may have saved a few bucks on a trip to the barbershop, my daughter, after surveying the final product, has been heard to say, “Oh, Dad! You really...”
So, just like with our yard work, we have a system, my daughter and I. She snips and clips and I do the clean up.
At the end of the morning, the yard looked good and my hair looked good.