Fall Is...HOA Letters

It's hard to get good yard help.

I have this yard guy named Billy Bachelor. He is a devil-may-care fellow who usually wears overalls with no shirt under them, but adds a hoodie jacket on top. His dental health is not great and if he were on a reality show, the producers would add subtitles when he speaks, though he is perfectly clear to me. He lives somewhere down around Athens, but he comes up here to do my spring and fall pine straw and cleanups.

I've written before, over the years, about our Home Owners' Association and its reign of terror. When the seasons change is usually when the hysterical letters start arriving in our mailbox. I don't even open them because I know what they say: Trim hedges, add pine straw to beds, paint the roses red, etc. Okay. Matt and I both pretend these letters do not exist and we never discuss them. To do so would be to acknowledge that neither of us will do yard work. I mean, Matt mows, and he removes leaves (once a season after they've all fallen down). But he is not out there tending the land. He works on his own projects all the time, and I am super lazy.

Sometimes a big part of a healthy marriage is just ignoring stuff together.

For a long time I never knew how to contact Billy Bachelor. He just appeared one day with a trailer full of pine straw. Then six months later, he was back, just in time. That was a few years ago. I started having him do more and more tasks. The guy knows a lot about plants. He'll come and look the place over, give me a list of stuff he'll do, then quote me a price. Then we negotiate and I think I'm being a real hardass, and then I talk him down, but I'm probably still paying him too much, and everybody is happy.

Week before last, I was really needing Billy to come back. Things were looking a bit overgrown. I was thinking, how do I summon that guy? There should be some kind of beacon. But then there he was! He brought his girlfriend and his father. We talked over what they would do and he said that if I paid a bit more he would remove this dead limb from a tall tree that hovers over our driveway. It really could decide to fall and hurt someone, so I said sure.

They set to work and did all the things. It took a few hours, and he said he'd have to come back the next day to do the tree limb. I said, "Well, shall I pay you today or tomorrow?" Of course he wanted to be paid that day. And he has not come back to do the tree. I know, duh. Which surprised me! He has always been pretty diligent in seeking my business, and I'm a good customer for him.

But he had given me his phone number. Aha! So I texted him and he didn't respond. I did not text him again, because I don't want to enter into a pestering text relationship with a south Georgia pine straw farmer.

So I imagine that Billy thinks he has burned a bridge with me? Or maybe not, maybe he hasn't thought of it at all. But I would be happy to see him again come Spring; I'm just going to hold him to our agreement about the tree limb, or tell him that since I effectively overpaid him the last time, I'm taking it off the next round of services.

If I were to text him, I would want to say something like, "You dropped the ball, but don't be embarrassed, I'm not even mad, you can pick it up the next time." But that doesn't seem like something that can happen?

I'm telling you all this because it's Saturday and nobody reads on Saturday.

I don't know why, but I always seem to have these ambivalent relationships with tradespeople and domestic helpers. Take my house cleaner Fabienne (please!), but that's a whole 'nother story.

I hope you are having a lovely evening. Right now Laura is on her way from the last Wizard show to the cast party. She is in her full glory! Life is too rich!

xoxo