Dreaded autumn yard work is beckoning

By Lethbridge Herald on October 1, 2022.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald

The time has come to say farewell – for two weeks. Yup, it’s autumn and that means a ton of yard work to get done before the dreaded snow begins falling and temperatures plummet.

With 12 Swedish columnars in the back yard, multiple rose bushes, vines and shrubs, my yard is a haven for birds and it’s a lot of work to maintain.

The biggest part of that maintenance is in fall when the leaves fall, many of them which blow to other neighbours, especially next door where they seem to accumulate around the front step swallowing up their own little shrubs. 

Being hopefully a good neighbour I like to clean up those leaves since they do come from my trees. Each year I haul probably 35 bags of leaves to the city recycling centre on the westside plus more bags filled with shrub branches and rose canes as I try to prepare for fall.

With the loss of an entire wall of Engleman’s Ivy this summer after a windstorm, birds have lost a winter roosting place so I’m going to be discreet in trimming the other sides of the house where I have vines and plant life to give them some protection. It won’t look the greatest but I’d rather be a good human being than have a good looking yard in winter. 

And if I can help to keep birds alive during the coldest months of the year, I’ll do what it takes.

And speaking of that ivy, I need to clamber up onto the roof to pull some of it out of the gutters and check for leaves. If anyone hears sirens on the westside, it may be due to me needing rescue.There are lawn chairs in the backyard if anyone wants to watch the entertainment.

I’m not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of falling and I’m really skilled at falling so this could be interesting.

Fall is one of my favourite seasons except for the early morning darkness. The colours, scents  and atmosphere are something special. I can even endure the smell of pumpkin spice in small amounts because it is the season, after all.

So the next two weeks are going to be hectic. I will still endeavour to cover from the comfort of my living room a city council meeting if one happens on my time off and perhaps a council committee meeting or two if I find them of particular interest to the community. 

For continuity sake, I think it’s important I follow these meetings because I know what’s been going on for the past year in council and am best suited given that experience to write about proceedings. And I don’t mind at all – extra hours come with the territory as we who have been in journalism for decades well know.

When my pal Frank McTighe in Fort Macleod and I started out, days off were something for other people. We were different from our friends who entered other professions because the news doesn’t take days off and we had stories to cover.

In the early 1980s, when Frank toiled in Taber he and I wrote – telephone calls were too expensive – regularly to keep each other updated on what we were doing and how. Frank and I bonded when we first met each other in journalism class back in 1978 and decades later we still occasionally keep in  touch when time and energy permit.

In the ‘80s I think we considered it to be a badge of honour to tell each other how many stories we wrote in a week or how many days in a row we’d worked. We used each other as a crying post when finances were tight and we were struggling to figure how we were going to make it through a month.

We all have those kinds of struggles when we’re young and as starting journalists when the hours were long and the pay modest, we had plenty of struggles and challenges.

In October of 1980, which was my first autumn in Ontario, I was so broke between rent, student loans and car payments, I lived off donated spaghetti for an entire month. That’s all I had, a huge supply of spaghetti given to me by a reporter who left Fort Frances for his home city of Sarnia. Terry Shaw also left me a sofa and a chair which were my first furnishings in my tiny apartment where I slept on an air mattress and sat on the floor until his donations. 

I always wanted to thank him but I learned later he’d died way too young of cancer.

With the need to cover assignments, what money I had needed to be put in my gas tank so I lived off carefully rationed amounts plain boiled spaghetti morning, noon and night for an entire month. 

I had too much pride to ask for help, and couldn’t afford to ask for another loan when I was having a rough time paying the ones I already had. And I honestly wasn’t sure family would help if I’d asked for any. And I certainly wasn’t going to ask people I barely knew for assistance.

That’s just how things were when a guy was making $900 a month and had bills to pay.  And as worrisome and as hopeless as the financial struggles were in those early days, in retrospect I wouldn’t have changed a thing because that experience taught me resilience, and resilience is something we all need to survive and thrive. 

That experience with abject poverty left a taste I’ll never forget and I got through it by keeping faith, by working hard and earning the salary raise that came shortly after which allowed me to buy groceries, the smell of the sizzling T-bone steak frying in butter that I treated myself to which I will never forget. I don’t know what it’s like to complete a marathon but that experience gives me an idea of how it must feel to reach the finish line.

This October as I clean the yard and afterwards sit in front of my 56-inch television screen watching football with satellite radio blaring in my earbuds and dogs at my side and a full fridge, I’ll think about that October and I’ll think about Frank and I’ll toast us both in silence because I know we both have lived through the darkness and worked our tails off to enjoy the sunlight at the end of that long tunnel. 

We all have to pay our dues in life if we want the best life can offer and I guarantee nobody knows that better than us.

Paying those dues isn’t easy but who ever said life is easy? Or should be easy?

Adversity teaches us about life and the lessons learned through facing and overcoming adversity are invaluable as we navigate this journey called life.

Follow @albeebHerald on Twitter.