Pulling back Thyme

Shhhh, don't tell guitar class I'm writing, they think I'm doing grades while they practice....

With summer coming to a close I had to get my yard in shape for fall, this included; pulling up my garden, mowing the grass shorter, cutting the herbs and rhubarb back to the ground, and winterizing the pond. I love working outside (provided its not too hot), I love the smell of dirt and cut grass and fallen leaves and that kind of rich, almost musty smell of things around the pond that are damp and in a state of starting to rot and form the stuff that is so good for the garden.

I have a parking strip, you know, that strip of grass that never stays green because you cant water it enough because the heat from the asphalt street slams it all summer making it look like straw. However, a few years ago, I killed off all the grass and put in sandstone rocks and a plant called creeping thyme. This stuff is GREAT!  It needs next to no water and it looks good. In the spring it flowers all purple and is quite a sight, the rest of the summer its green....and creeps. 

The problem is that it creeps and covers up all of my rocks, so by this time of year it starts looking like this  (Ok, it doesnt look bad, but I paid good money for the rocks and I think they should be seen).

Where the difficulty lies (and this entails me admitting I'm not as young as I once was) is that pulling the thyme back from the rocks means I have to get down on my hands and knees and crawl around on rocks for the better part of an hour.  As I started doing this a few weeks ago I made some parallels.

Sometimes, pulling back thyme is difficult. There are often places where it is so overgrown and intertwined that it hurts my hands.

I know that soon I'm going to have to pull back time and remember some things I don't want to remember, but doing so is going to pave the way to Gary and I being sealed...and there is nothing I want more in life right now, than that.

In pulling back thyme I exposed some ugly little bugs, that scared me...and a few that crawled right up my arm!

  I know that bugs are going to interfere with my pulling back time, they will make me jump back and want to walk away from what has to be done because they are gross or ugly or could bite, but I have to look past them to the end result.

More than once I had to get up from my knees and empty out the overgrowth from the clean up bucket.

I'm sure that in pulling back time I'm going to have to convince my knees to bend and allow someone to clear the overgrowth of fear and doubt from my mind.

While I was pulling back the thyme I looked around and realized that some of my rocks had been completely covered over and lost.

Sometimes, losing or forgetting time isn't a bad thing. Right now, I wish I could be allowed to leave some of these "rocks" in my life covered over, it would mean less heartache. But I guess there must be a purpose in the requirement of "clearing the rocks"....I just wish I knew better what it was.

After and hour, and then some, I finished and I looked back on my parking strip. I could see the rocks, not necessarily their jagged edges, but that they were all there, and that they each played an integral part the landscape of the parking strip. I'm glad I only have to do this a couple of times a summer, it's hard on my knees and rough on my hands. But the end result is something unique and beautiful.

I guess its time to do what is necessary,

and pull back time.