Attacking ugly bushes
Many years ago, when my sons were still small children at day care and my wife was an elementary school teacher, I found myself in an amazing situation — I had a day off. As my wife left for work, she asked me to do a little yard work. “Would you cut down that ugly bush out front? I can’t stand looking at it anymore,” she said. I assured her I would, since I thought that bush was hideous, too, but assumed she liked it since she’d never mentioned it to me. So when I got to that task in the early afternoon I approached it with gusto. I was going to eradicate the bushy blight from our front yard. I gathered the necessary tools and wheelbarrow and headed out to meet the offender. There it stood, directly in front of our porch steps, just a couple of strides away — a big, malformed azalea that looked like someone had gathered up all the discarded pieces from a play date with one of those Play-Doh barbershop sets, wadded them up and tossed them aside onto some toothpicks. I was going t...