Living With Gramps - Trimming The Hedge
“The hedge needs trimming,” Grampa said out-of-the-blue.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Apparently, unlike the apple tree and the pear tree, the hedge plants had not yet reached their natural size limit and would keep growing if we didn’t cut them back. That didn’t bother me any but my grandfather thought they were too high already. He told me to cut it back as far as I could no matter how bad it looked and how few leaves were left. “It will grow back. It always grows back.”
Since it was only May and I believed most of the growth was from the previous summer when I was not yet there, I wasn’t in a hurry. I thought I could trim the whole thing once in June or July and be done with it for the entire year. At first, grampa agreed, but within days he started complaining it wasn’t done yet.
The first step was finding the trimmer. My grandfather kept mentioning an electric trimmer with a special knob to wrap the cord around so it would not come unplugged. We could not find it. I did find a chainsaw and two gas-powered weedwhackers, but the only trimmer I could find was battery-powered. It worked reasonably well, but the battery only lasted so long. There were two batteries, but they took at least twelve hours to charge and only one could be charged at a time. Based on how far I got on the first day of using it, I estimated it would take eleven days to finish the hedge. This was much more work than I had bargained on.
So many of the stems had grown so thick that the trimmer could not handle them and kept getting stuck. To find stems it could handle on the top of the hedge, I had to keep the heavy trimmer raised above shoulder height. The hedge was so wide I could not reach all the way to the middle from either side. On the sides of the hedges, the angle of the stems meant they were more likely to pushed out of the way than cut. The sun was bright and the heat was tiring. It was a nightmare. At least I remembered sunscreen.
In the meantime, my grandfather kept wondering where the other trimmer had gone. He took many trips with me to the barn/garage and basement. We found a much-smaller battery-powered trimmer, which was so weak it was utterly useless. We also found a contraption with missing parts that looked like it might have been used to run a cordless trimmer from a cord. It had a wire running into a block of wood the exact size and shape as the batteries I had been using. Embedded in the wood were metal contacts in just the right places. Oddly, the cord end was the wrong sex. It was a female end when we needed a male end.
When the hedge was more than half done, we finally found the right trimmer! My grandfather showed me where the extension cords were and where to plug it into the barn so I could reach the farthest ends of the yard.
Only then did he remember that my parents had driven their RV through the power line running to the barn four years ago so that the barn no longer had power. I was going to have to plug it into the house. Of course, the extension cords (some 2 pronged and some 3 pronged) would not reach. It wasn’t even close. Not one part of the hedge could be reached – not from the house and not from the barn. How did he ever do it? I just kept using the battery trimmer until I finished. It took eight days.
Several weeks later, I found the hundred-foot extension cord in the basement.
That was the end of the story, but come July my grandfather wanted the hedge trimmed again. Twice in one year? I had better things to do!
It was getting away from us. I had not been able to cut it as low as he liked and its rapid growth surprised even me. I explained that it was already too big for me to trim it properly and he spiraled into deeper and deeper despair. In august, I trimmed the nearest parts of hedge with the extension cord trimmer and the farthest parts with the battery trimmer. It took five days.
The next winter, I took the loppers to the thickest stems of the longest bushes and cut it way back. I made a huge pile of branches that I later burned.
Unfortunately, it was all for naught since I never had time the next summer to trim it. His health took a turn for the worse and so I could barely leave the house. I was also tired all the time. The hedge had won.
Hedge: 1
Stubbornness: 0