The Right Tools

My yard has bushes. Lots of them. And the thing I’ve learned about bushes in the twenty-three years I’ve owned my home is that they just keep growing. It starts every single spring, relentlessly, and without exception. This means that if I don’t want to live in a jungle, they need to be trimmed. I got a pair of sheers when we bought the house, but they proved inadequate for my temperament. They were slow and exacting. I wanted something fast and destructive. I wanted to give my yard a buzzcut, not a hairdo.

So, about ten years ago, I broke down and decided to get some hedge trimmers. I normally resist these kinds of purchases as they require me to spend time in hardware stores, which I consider foreign terrain. I’m not what you would call handy, and I’m a bit self-conscious about my lack of fluency with the vernacular of tools. Nonetheless, I found myself standing before a wall of hedge trimmers. They came in different sizes. My bushes were not small. Many were so overgrown I needed a ladder to reach their tops. But because I had never owned a trimmer, and because they were sharp and mechanical, I bought the smallest. I didn’t feel ready for more.

I was excited the first time I plugged the trimmer in and prepared to finally tame my yard. At last, I would master this wilderness. Unfortunately, most of the branches were just pushed around and irritated, not sheered clean off. Nothing was tamed. I chalked it up to a failed experiment, to my own naiveté and lack of lawn-tool knowledge. I’d go back to my sheers, and leave the world of trimmers to the professionals and handymen.

Then, two weeks ago, I was in the alley behind my house working on our massive lilac bush, hoping to avoid yet another letter from the city telling me the garbage trucks were having trouble getting through, when my neighbors rumbled up in their pickup truck. We’d never spoken, but they stopped and the husband rolled down his window, and asked gravely, “You want to borrow my hedge trimmers?”

His wife was also looking at me humorously, which I took to mean they both understood the seriousness of my labor. Or that they were sick of looking at my over-grown bushes. Either way, because they were driving a pickup truck, I decided their gardening equipment would be first rate. “Yes,” I said. “I do want to borrow your hedge trimmers.”

The husband nodded in a one-homeowner-to-another kind of way, and told me he’d bring them by. I watched him park and then emerge from his garage. I was skeptical when he handed me his trimmers. They looked exactly like mine only a little bigger. “This’ll cut them?” I asked.

“Definitely.”

I took them into my yard, fetched my extension cords, and set to work. It was glorious. They sliced through every kind of bush I had, from the spruce to the yew bush to the hydrangea. I couldn’t wait to buy my own 22-inch trimmers, and never pick up the anemic 12-incher I had wielded so ineffectively. It occurred to me standing there listening to the mighty blades whir, that I routinely put off trimming my hedges simply because I was poorly equipped. I had created a taxing, sweaty, frustrating experience for myself, which I naturally avoided.

Now, it is friendly, productive and enticing. How easy it is to misplace the source of my discomfort, as if my own yard were growing against me and my wishes, and would not naturally yield when approached with the right tools.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com