Am I bright enough to shine in your space?

We need to talk. No, no, I'm not breaking up with you. Just a little chit chat. You know, girl time. I just need a little validation, and not about how my butt looks in these jeans.

Let’s talk for a minute about what it must be like to be retired. You see, every single one of my neighbors in every direction from my home is retired. In fact, most of these folks are the original owners of the homes, and our house was built in 1955. While we love our senior buddies, this is a major contributing factor in why we would love to move out, oh, basically yesterday. When I dropped Bug off in nursery last week, there were 2 children there. And you know me, so you know I was not early.

But anyway, that’s not the point. One of the downsides to living next to retirees is that they have the funds and the considerable time it takes to manicure absolutely perfect yards. I’m not kidding you, I have honestly never seen one leaf out of place in the yard of our next door neighbors or the delightful lady across the street. I pity the dandelion who considers for even the briefest second venturing over our fence and into that manicured oasis. It’s fields of green velvet as far as the eye can see, until you get to the patchy island that is our yard. We could basically be running a crab grass and clover farm in our front yard, and let’s not even discuss the back.

Our neighbors put up with our not-up-to-snuff yard number one: because they are cute, number two: because they like us, and number three: because every year we work very hard to make it just a bit better than the year before. We’ve had some crazy adventures in this front yard, and I’d like to think we’re close to trumping at least the neighbors with the potted silk plants on their porch.

With that effort in mind, MJ, Bug and I spent the day in the front yard raking and pulling weeds and planting petunias and thoroughly enjoying the STUNNING weather. The Germans next door were also out, puttering around in their already brilliant yard doing who-knows-what to their already perfectly symmetrical bushes. I chose to ignore the sight of the 86 year old wife on a ladder wiping down her window screens with a sponge, and smiled to myself about how low on my priority list the cleanliness of my screens would be, assuming I actually had time to generate a priority list.

But a girl’s got to draw the line somewhere. There must be a point where, free time or not, meticulousness borders on obsessive, right?

For me, that line falls far before I find myself scrubbing my brick windowsills on the exterior of my house with AJAX and a brush. Oh yeah. This happened.

So I just picked up my daughter with her crazy orphan hair and walked my filthy bare feet inside to eat a banana, because there was simply nothing else to do.