Quite awhile ago, I used to own a landscape company. I was pretty well known in my little area.

There was a single mother I knew that would always stop me when she saw me at the store or gas station or wherever and comment on how nice my yard looked. Or she would comment on someone else's that she happened to see.

She would always go on about how she wanted to have her yard redone to have the smell of flowers during the summer. She'd gone so far as to have me draw up a plan for her, but as a single-mom journalist constantly fighting with her ex about child support I knew a renovation wasn't likely to happen.

Then I heard through the grapevine that her septic had failed and she took a 2nd mortgage to have it fixed, but the asshole contractor didn't clean up after himself and basically ruined what little semblance of a yard she had. Her front was taken up by her sloped gravel driveway and so this meant that her three kids had essentially nowhere to play unless it was in the mountains of rank mud that dominated the backyard.

As luck would have it, for her anyway, someone had backed out of a project at the last moment a few weeks prior and I was sitting on a bunch of material (plants) that were starting to look like abused orphans in my driveway.

I contacted her and asked if I could help getting her yard sorted. She told me I was very thoughtful to ask, but she was being sent out of town the next morning on assignment. She told me I was welcome to come take a look as she was desperate for advice and that she'd leave the gate unlocked for me if I would just lock it when I left.

I decided right then at the end of that conversation that I was gonna have a busy weekend.

I enlisted my two employees and a couple cousins and we were off to the races. We re-sod her backyard after cleaning it up, pressure washed the swing set back to usability, and created new foundation beds while finding homes for all the orphan plants. We also pruned and mulched the front beds after removing a fairly large dead juniper. Pressure washed the front porch and last but not least, weeded her gravel driveway.

I left her a voicemail sounding forlorn and gave her an estimated cost for the backyard, but said we could talk about maybe doing it in stages, or payments and to give me a call once she got back.

She did call, but it was mostly to cry and thank me repeatedly.

I miss landscaping.