All That Glitters Is Not Gold

The first time I saw this house and property, I cried.

It wasn't the hideous paneling that reduced me to tears, or the mustard-yellow plastic kitchen counters and avocado-green plastic bathtubs original to the 1970s single-wide trailer. No, bad as those things were (and, in the latter case, still are), it was the glass and metal littering the ground that did it.

The entire back pasture--an area that encompasses approximately half an acre of bare dirt--glittered with broken glass and bristled with old nails.

Meticulous landscaping was not one of Dale's interests.

I walked around this junkyard while Dale showed me the old pig pens and chicken coop, and as I went back to the car to buckle the children in, I literally had tears in my eyes. This was where I was going to raise my children? This junked property that resembled a miniature war-torn city was where my crawling baby would play outside?

And so, I cried. Just a little.

Even at the time, I realized this was ridiculously dramatic*. It was just glass and metal. Nothing a little work couldn't fix.

Or, as it turned out, a lot of work. A lot of stooped, tedious, drawn-out work.

A. conceived of a very clever method for getting up most of the metal. He attached a big roller magnet to a long-handled metal rake. This way, he can rake the dirt, and the nails and so on stick to the magnet. This is still a lot of work, but at least he has a tool to help him.

Perhaps he can launch a line of tools under the Woodchuck Man brand name.

The bits of broken glass, however? There's no tool for that. Nothing for it but to pick each piece up individually. And so, I have.

Thankfully, this is something I can do while the children play outside. Especially now that Poppy is big enough to walk around and mostly entertain herself outside.

Where "entertainment"=climbing up on a cinder block and falling off over and over again. It's like woodchuck step aerobics.

There's a box that stays in the back pasture that I am steadily filling with pieces of glass.

There have been other boxes with glass in them that have already gone to the dump, but this is the most recent.

Yesterday I found a disposable coffee cup blowing around and within 10 minutes had filled it with the junk under the clothesline, so it's not just the pasture that needs some work.

A. has big plans for an orchard and vineyard in that pasture, which would certainly be an improvement over the bare dirt, but first we have to get rid of all the glass and nails. A. sourly remarked that it would have been a lot more fun to be here when all those bottles of beer were being drunk and used for target practice. True. But he's raked almost all of the pasture, and I've picked up most of the glass, so we're getting there.

And I don't feel like crying anymore when I see the back pasture, so big improvements all around. 

* It had been a very long day with the children because A. had been gone all day, so I wasn't at my strongest mentally or emotionally anyway.