Helping Out

Our yard guy was doing our final fall clean-up and, as he is a friend and the kids love his mom who was with him, we went out to help.  But after awhile, helping got boring . . . .

No Springtime in the Rockaways

My in-laws' front yard in the Rockaways.

We visited my in-laws this weekend, for the first time since the hurricane.  It was, for me, an unexpected consequence of Sandy:  all the vegetation in the Rockaways is dead, killed by saltwater and sand.  The typical suburban landscape with trees, bushes, flowers, and lawns looks strange--desolate and barren. I don't remember noticing that about post-hurricane New Orleans with its urban landscape or devastated beach communities with no lawns.  Or maybe it's because I didn't know those communities as well in the first place.  I wonder if this is what the tsunami-inundated places looked like a year or more later--brown where there had once been green?  People in the Rockaways, who have hurricane fatigue, are again cleaning--this time clearcutting gardens and lawns, piling dead wood on the curb for pick up, shoveling up inches of debris-filled soil.  My in-laws have lost all their greenery, front and back, their little bit of yard filled with glass and sand.  And, having only just completed repairs inside the house, I'm not sure they can even contemplate repairs outside.  Especially with Ma having a cornea transplant next Tuesday and Gong starting cancer treatment on Wednesday.  For all of these reasons, please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

A Boulder New Look

We're having our driveway repaved today.  It's been crackling, buckling, and most problematically draining the entire street into our backyard (we had to sandbag during the hurricane so it wouldn't come in the house!).  The driveway was 25-30 years old with such erosion that loose rocks would come out of it every time it rained.  And while I'm looking forward to a new, flat, safe surface (with a small expansion at the garage) and the new Belgian blocks along the edge to help with erosion, I'm most excited by the two boulders and two big rocks that the crew unearthed in the process--landscape features!  We've added the small ones to our existing rock wall and the two huge ones (which he estimated at 1 1/2-2 tons each!) in line with my favorite rock.   The kids are going to love playing on them and one of them is tall enough for me to lean against when I'm outside.  Really a pretty amazing reminder that the Ice Age glaciers came through here and those big boulders probably hadn't been unearthed or moved since then (with the Ice Age beginning 2-3 million years ago, the last glacier left the area about 22,000 years ago, after several advances and recessions).  Too bad the kids were at school for it--what a great geology lesson that would have been!