The bushes in front of the house had just gotten out of hand: they shaded almost 3/4 of the height of the windows in E’s and L’s rooms. Every time I trimmed them, K suggested that I didn’t do enough, so today was the day: the bushes were getting violently trimmed.

That was to take only a couple of hours. I’d planned on mowing the backyard, trimming the bushes, mowing the front, and finishing before four. Two things slowed me down: E and the difficulty of radically trimming the bushes.

The Boy always loves helping me mow, which usually entails slipping between me and the upper bar of the lawnmower, resulting in an awkward position for me and generally slow mowing. Today it struck me: our lawnmower has rear-wheel drive, and so theoretically, the Boy could mow all by himself, with me just walking along beside to help control it.

When we got to the flattest portions of the front yard, I let him mow without my hand on the bar to guide it.

“I’ll just let you mow,” I said, “and then the spots you miss, you’ll have to go back and get.”

He loved the idea and promptly went zig-zagging across the yard. He tended to pull to the left, so he made strange arching patterns instead of the regular straight lines I obsessively put into our yard.

The period of time between the first bit of mowing and the second bit (the “flattest portions of the front yard” mentioned above) was approximately six hours, evidenced by the changing shadows in the pictures above.

In the intervening hours, we worked on the bushes. I trimmed; he loaded the cuttings into the wheelbarrow.

When we started, the foliage was so dense that it blocked most of the light and all of the sky.

When we finished, nothing was really blocked. I worried as I cut back the branches that it might be too late for such work, that I might damage the bushes by doing this. In the end, I thought that that might, in fact, be a blessing.

In between the first and the second bushes — lunch and a concert.

K and L spent most of the day inside, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Cleaning clothes, floors, bathrooms, and anything else that would sit still long enough. In the end, though, K had to come out: her garden beckoned.

“When will we ever have a relaxed Saturday?” K asked as we sat on the front steps watching the kids, who still had energy, play in the front yard.

“A relaxed Saturday? What’s that?”