The Changing Landscape

As I’m writing this there are five big, burly men in my backyard flexing their muscles and sweating.

Yes, life as a romance writer is pretty good.

But seriously, they’re cutting down a tree. Several in fact. The noise from the wood chopper is deafening and constant and I’m sitting at my computer trying to get some work done in between trips to the window to watch them change the face of my backyard.

We had a huge, towering Blue Spruce that was dying by degrees and needed to be removed. On the end of the house were a collection of pathetic bushes that have been slowly succumbing to the heat of the air conditioning unit and the encroaching shade of the neighbor’s overhanging trees. Our enormous Sugar Maple [I love this tree] is starting to take over the house and it refuses to allow grass to grow for more than a few minutes in the back, so it’s being trimmed.

Later today we’ll have sunlight where we used to have shade, and big open space where we used to have pine barrens.

Change is good. Right?

I have a hard time with change. I like to make progress – in fact it’s my motto – but I’m still very resistant to changing things. [Just ask my husband when it’s time to upgrade a computer program. I don’t like it when things work differently – and not always better, than they did before.] I usually dread the major changes of the year – the end of school, changing over to the lazy summer routine, then the beginning of the school year, getting back into the swing of a tight schedule. I love the gradual change from summer to fall into winter for some reason, but the first warm day of spring usually makes me a little sad [yes, I’m weird that way.]

It takes a while for me to get used to things and it’s going to be strange to see how the back yard looks now. I know I’ll get used to it, like I do every other necessary change in life, but there’s still that moment when you long for the way things were just because it was familiar and easy.

Tomorrow I’m blogging at StarCrossed Romance, but I’ll put up some pictures of the yard the way it looks now.