DOWNHOME: Not-so-patiently learning to wait

Posted: 1/04/08

DOWNHOME:
Not-so-patiently learning to wait

If you pray for patience, God might move you to a Texas neighborhood with plenty of trees.

(By the way, never pray for patience or wisdom unless you really mean it. Those are wonderful virtues, but their acquisition comes with a steep, steep price.)

Joanna and I moved to our home in Coppell, in far northwest Dallas County, not quite a year and a half ago. Our girls both had graduated from high school, and Jo and I realized we could trim our commute time without uprooting our progeny. So, we moved.

From a practical standpoint, we were thrilled with the shorter driving times each day. From an emotional standpoint, we reveled in the homey-ness of our house. And from an almost spiritual standpoint, we adored all the trees.

I grew up in a part of the Texas Panhandle where trees were about as common as Church of Christ preachers at the citywide revival. Then, when we moved back to Texas a dozen years ago, we bought a new house in a subdivision where the builder scraped mesquite off the prairie and planted two sticks in the front yard.

So, when we decided to move, we fell in love with this “older” neighborhood. (OK, it’s been here only 20 years, but in this part of Dallas-Fort Worth, that’s old.) The developer managed to build houses without removing old-growth trees. And homeowners supplemented them with plenty of oaks, maples and native elm. The centerpiece of our front yard is a small stand of bald cypress that wave bright green in the spring and summer and turn rusty-crimson in autumn.

A year ago last fall, flush with zeal to keep a “clean” yard, I wound up blowing/raking leaves out of our yard at least three times.

This fall, Jo convinced me I’d be a lunatic to maintain that pace. Considering she knows a lunatic when she looks at one over breakfast, I took her advice. We decided to wait until all the leaves fell off our trees before bagging them.

We bided our time. Actually, Jo bided her time and calmed me down when I complained about our “embarrassing” yard. Finally, the Saturday after Christmas, we looked up at bare trees, and I trekked down to the local hardware store to rent a backpack leaf blower. A few hours later, we had a beautiful, neat yard and a couple dozen huge paper bags of leaves in the alley.

I was so proud.

Sunday morning, the wind blew out of the north. By the time we got home from church, 73 percent of the leaves from our neighbor across the street littered our yard. It looked like Saturday never happened.

Now, we’re waiting for every leaf to drop from every tree within a three-block radius. That’s when Jo will allow me to go back to the hardware store for the leaf blower.

We’re waiting, all right.

But we’re not praying for patience.

–Marv Knox