By Katie Ginn
Have y’all read the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”? If you give a mouse a cookie then he’ll want a glass of milk, and so on. Feeding this critter sets off a whole series of events.
Well, if you give Stephen Ginn a home improvement project, he’ll add three or four related projects. And actually, you don’t have to “give” him a project to begin with. He comes up with them on his own.
It’s taken some time, but I’m (mostly) grateful for this tendency of his. Take this summer: We added a brick border to our flowerbed, built shelves for the storage room in our garage, hung a rail system in the garage for shovels and such – and gave our backyard a facelift.
As a single homeowner, I had let the honeysuckle and privet bushes run wild at one end of the back fence. At the other end of the fence stood a beautiful water oak – along with a handful of mostly dead trees, plus some cinder blocks left behind by the builders. The water oak’s limbs were so long they dragged the ground. Getting under there with a lawnmower or weedeater was an exercise in slapstick comedy. Not that there was much to mow or cut, other than poison ivy.
Basically, one end of the fence was a jungle of wild bushes, and the other end was no-man’s land: You didn’t go in unless you had to, and you emerged swatting at cobwebs, mosquitoes, or imaginary horrors.
Stephen wanted to remove the bushes, the dead-ish trees, and the cinder blocks, and trim the water oak’s limbs. More specifically, he wanted to pay others to do all this. Once he’d assured me that we’d eventually plant something to replace the bushes, I was on board. Especially with the not-doing-it-ourselves part.
So one of Stephen’s coworkers and a friend pulled out chainsaws and piled limbs and concrete on our sidewalk. Finally, we were left with that single beautiful water oak, trimmed to the point that we could walk under it.
That’s when the proverbial mouse finished his cookie and wanted a glass of milk.
Stephen wasn’t content to let the tree sit there with bare earth all around it, where the grass had failed to thrive under the formerly oppressive limbs. So we borrowed my dad’s truck and bought 20 bags of mulch at Lowe’s.
We had to buy two different kinds of brown mulch. That, plus three bags of red mulch that we already had … meant a lot of mixing. Or to be more precise, a lot of lifting, ripping, dumping, mixing, dumping again, and raking.
After 23 bags’ worth of all that, Stephen said, “I think we need more.” The layer of mulch was too thin, bald spots too easily revealed. I groaned. We went to Lowe’s again. Ten more bags of brown mulch and no more mixing, just cutting bags open and dumping, over and over.
Finally, when we had it all spread out like a giant Christmas tree skirt, he said, “This is right.” And I could see that it was.
We’d love to put a bench or some other kind of sitting area next to the water oak. I’ve tested it. I grabbed a bag chair (hanging from the new rail system in the garage!) and took it to the tree, and I found a spot where I was mostly blocked from the view of both neighbors. The humidity was low, the temperature in the 70s (remember that little autumn tease from late August?), and I could’ve sat there forever.
Yes, sometimes I get impatient with the extent of Stephen’s plans. (Do we really need more mulch? Do we really need to level out those bricks around the flowerbed? Do we really have to paint and prime and putty every shelf for the storage room?) But he’s taught me the value of making things better.
Ever since the first chapter of scripture, humanity has been called to cultivate the earth, along with themselves and their community. We do this to create a kingdom culture that reaches its fullest potential.
So we mulch. We set boundaries, with bricks and with calendars. We cut out the dead weight and prune the living limbs, despite the pain, because it produces something more beautiful and useful than before.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go test the angle of the sunlight in our new outdoor sitting area.