Our First Fall Here, and Millions of Leaves

“Fall is a second spring where every leaf is a flower” –Camus

Two acres. Covered with leaves, and most of our trees are not even bare yet. The color isn’t really all that variegated, unfortunately, as we have mostly tulip poplars on our property. It’s very wild. Lots of deer roam, also.

Just one of our deer neighbors.

Our house was built in 1980, and we are only just the second owners. Little has been changed (the interior is worthy of another blog post!), and the landscaping (such as it was) was left to grow wild and untended. In spite of that, we fell in love with the feel of privacy given by all these trees.

We probably have close to a hundred trees, including saplings. But we are finding that having this many can also be a negative (other than all the fallen leaves, which is really a nothing). When we had a major storm this summer, a couple of those trees dropped huge limbs on my older son’s car, totaling it. We get almost no sun by the pool, making it pointless to try to stay warm when out of the pool.

I love these trees, but the time will have to come when we decide which ones have to go. Diseased ones will be easy. The ones nearer our house and driveway may have to go, also. We don’t want any more totaled cars or the potential of a destroyed roof. The hard part will be choosing which ones surrounding our pool will have to go.

Just a few probably will go at a time, though. Taking down trees, especially large ones, are really expensive. I’m sure it’s one reason why the previous owners left the property to become wild again. Most of the houses in our neighborhood are refined and manicured in comparison.

There is much to do overall, but in the past five months we have been taking care of immediate concerns. Our well tested positive for coliforms, so we had to have a new well cap put in. The entire water treatment system was replaced. The pool was crumbling, so we had that redone — but still need to fix the heating system (one part of why the water is so freaking cold, not just because it’s shady). We painted much of the interior. Our hot water heater broke just before my 50th birthday. Had to have a bat exclusion done. We spent a lot of time cleaning up the aftermath of the summer storm, and have lots of firewood as a result, but our chimney needs to be repaired before we can build a fire.

And there’s still more. I’m not even talking about facelifts we’d like to do. It’s overwhelming sometimes.

Yesterday I was trying to clean cobwebs around our front door with a broom, and accidentally broke one of our very 1980s style glass globe exterior light. My husband says our house looks more hillbilly than ever now, because we also have a broken lamppost at the entry of our driveway.

But, still, in spite of all this, in spite of the blood sweat and tears, I am content in where we are now. Our kids love this house. I would never have thought that a 1980 contemporary would be a house style we would live in, but here we are! I keep saying that one day we will look back and laugh at the year 2015. It hasn’t been much fun for the most part. Lots of ups and downs. But that’s life!