Lately I’ve had a serious case of wild hairs—and I don’t mean as a result of a bad hairstyle.
I’ve been caught up in a sudden urge to do something, and as my daughter says is often the case once you start a project, it turns into more than expected.
A few weekends ago, a neighbor asked my companion, Lou, to take some photos around her farm and offered fresh produce as a trade. I went with him on the “assignment” and saw a pile of broken, old pallets, on which her husband had stacked hay, and said I’d love to have one for crafts. She carried one to the truck for me and proceeded to fill a cardboard box with squash, zucchini and tomatoes.
I was barely home when the grating, scooping and chopping began. Before the sun set that day, I had made zucchini boats filled with venison, a zucchini spice cake and banana-chocolate muffins with green flecks. I substituted half the suggested amount of mashed bananas for grated zucchini and added a generous squirt of my brother’s honey for good measure. The result was awesome.
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It was an exhausting afternoon, but the table was covered with enough stuff to split the seasonal bounty three ways. We had meals for a few days—and boats on ice for the future—and my mother and the farmers got samples of everything produced that day.
Then the next weekend arrived.
Lou always asks me on Friday nights about the game plan for the next day and I didn’t have anything specific in mind, at the time. When Saturday dawned and temperatures were a bit cooler than normal, the hedge trimmers called out to me, and I had to respond.
The boxwood bushes in front of our picture window had sprouted so much new growth, we had trouble seeing the flower bed outside. Plus, they’d been damaged in January’s snowstorms and I knew there were some dead branches that needed to be removed.
Well, several hours later, we had filled the back of Lou’s truck, twice, with big pieces that either snapped off or were cut out with his retractable saw, along with clippings we had raked up. Our shrubs had to be shaped more like umbrellas than boxes as a result of storm damage, but the space the Addams family-style pruning opened up was great.
Which led to the next wild hair, on Sunday.
A few sidewalk stepping stones had been overshadowed by the looming boxwoods so I decided to scrape off the dirt and grass that had grown around them. That wasn’t much of a chore. As I packed up the tools, my eye caught the pallet we’d gotten from our farmer friends. I’d broken it into planks which were in disarray on the picnic table.
Wild hair No. 3 took over and I wanted them cut into smaller, workable pieces. More tools were brought out and more mess was made and cleaned up. Later, I attacked the remaining zucchini, making more muffins and grating the rest to fill up freezer bags for future batches.
While one result of all the wild hairs was a sore back and neck that’s lasted for more days than I care to admit, another has been a wonderful feeling of accomplishment—and certainly a better view out the front window.
And, as soon as the hydrangea blooms have died off on the three bushes around the house, I’m going to attack those. But that project doesn’t really qualify as a wild hair if I’ve announced my intentions, right?
