Unexpected Find

Among the first things I did in the way of yard work after returning from our trip out West, was to trim the hedges around our guesthouse. When neatly trimmed, they resemble large green snowballs approximately two feet in diameter. But, our extremely hot summer was sufficient cause for me to delay what should have been a mid-summer’s trim for these little beauties that simply grew and grew in spite of the heat.

They grew to the point where their limbs were interlocking, and it would have been far easier to treat the row of seven shrubs as one unit, but because they provide a nice contrast to the boxy run of hedges across the front of the main house, I determined to maintain them as orbs in hope that others might find the differences as aesthetically pleasing as I do.

I stood before the first of them, gas-powered hedge trimmer in hand, much as an Army barber might prepare to shear the flowing locks of a new recruit in boot camp; it’s all got to go, so it doesn’t really matter where one starts. I started by taking about ten inches off the top, and then I clipped another ten inches off the sides making the shrub appear barrel shaped. The rest of the job was simply to shape the limbs as spherically as possible.

There may be shrubs one can kill by severe pruning at the wrong time of the year, but I’ve not been privileged to have them in my yard. My hedges are like my crepe myrtles in that though they be hewn down, they’ll sprout from the roots and continue living. My wife thought I had killed the shrubs because they remained bare of leaves for weeks. However, last week green leaves returned to the shorn shrubbery.

By the time I set the trimmers into the thick greenery of the seventh shrub, I was close to overheating. As I brushed aside the clipped limbs from the top of the shrub, I spotted what looked like a strip of translucent plastic intertwined in the shrub. On closer inspection, I could see it was the skin of a snake. It was impossible to remove the skin to measure it, but I’d guess the length was perhaps thirty inches.

Since Barbara was home, I couldn’t resist showing her the find. She’s deathly afraid of snakes. Just knowing one had been near one of our houses sent a shiver down her spine.

In the history of our living in Dogwood Circle, I have not seen a snake on our property, save for the one that made it into our computer room a few years ago, though I’ve often been leery of them when toiling in the kudzu patch around back or the thick ground cover on the north end of the house.

It was already dark, last Friday night, as we were about to leave our house to eat supper at The Red Rooster. I clicked the remote entry device for my company car to help illuminate the area as we walked toward the car parked directly in front of the shrub, where I had found the snake skin.

I offered a word of caution, “You know that bush on your side of the car is where I showed you that snake skin.”

Well, that’s all it took for Barbara to stop her forward progress and wait for me to back the car out from in front of the shrub, so she wouldn’t have to step onto the grass.

Sometimes my evil nature gets the best of me.