Backyard @ The Bungalow (front yard too... but that doesn't lend itself well to alliteration)

The Bungalow, our 85 year old arts and crafts brick home sits on an in town lot about an acre in size. The lot is longer than it is wide, but if my Chinese friends saw the width of our yard they would consider it huge.

Mr Johnson and I got to know of our yard over the course of home ownership. We trimmed the old hedge, tended the forgotten peonies, cursed the creeping charlie that has crept all over the back yard. We discovered the rhubarb in the overgrown Medusa of trumpet vine, and rescued a sun loving lilac bush from a unsuitable shady spot. Mr Johnson trimmed trees with his chain saw, dug and filled a small pond. I spent a few hours every week on the lawn mower, creating neat contrasting lines of green across our acre lot. In the fall I would again get out the green lawn tractor, almost every afternoon when the leaves began to fall, and mulch up the autumn leaves while my babies napped in their second story bedroom.

And then we moved to China.

Five years of sweat equity was followed by five years of renter-level maintenance.

Our lot now looks not unlike how it did when we bought place.

Ramshackle.

Rundown.

In fact, when my parent's visited last month, my dad (who rarely says these kinds of things out loud) suggested we hire a lawn service. "It looks like it will be a lot of work."

Today I fired up the faithful green lawn tractor. Mr Johnson purchased a new gas can for me, with a stop/flow button and a trigger for easy filling. (He filled it with gas that now costs nearly $4 a gallon thanks in part to Mr Quadaffi's antics and gutsy oil companies who can get away with it.)

No leaves where mulched up last fall.

Given the despairing looking bald patches across the lawn, leaves haven't been mulched for many fall seasons. The leaves of at least 10 trees (not including the neighbors') filled our front ditch, my flower beds, the hedge and got caught in the lawn itself.

I started with an old rake and spread the leaves out to dry. Then I began a slow back and forth motion, taking the leaves of octogenarian maples and an old oak and chopping them smaller and smaller with each pass.

Instead of smothering the lawn, they will now feed it. Their spent lives now giving new life to the shoots below.

Back and forth over the ditch.

Then passes across the front lawn.

Out came the leaf blower and more raking action, followed by the whir of the blade as it chopped and mulched and cut. Then to the back yard, where the mighty branches of our ancient magnolia will soon burst forth in pink bloom. The old leaves,the dead ones from last season, those long, heavy oblong magnolia leaves where chopped up too.

My time on the mower is therapeutic, and I forgot how much so. In China we had a tiny patch of land for a yard. We tended it with an 'green' non-motorized push reel mower and trimmed with an electric weed trimmer. Sometimes Mr Johnson would cut it, but more often than not our driver and friend Mr Zhang trimmed. My garden activities were limited to tending potted plants and nurturing herbs in my kitchen windowsill.

There's lots going on in the world these days. Our globe found a permanent spot on the kitchen table where we reference the exact location of places we read in the news ... Sendai, Okinawa (where my brother lives), the Aleutian Islands ... We're also still peeking at places like Bahrain (I'm both proud and simultaneously embarrassed that our resident junior high student routinely schools me on locations in North Africa and the Middle East), even though the news media seems to have moved on.

It's lots to think about and process. It's sad and real and overwhelming and seemingly happening in real time (we watch as it happens), unless of course, you are my expat friends in China, who can only read or blog or sign into facebook or, even their google based email accounts, if the Great Firewall of China allows them. (http://carihal.com/news/latest-news-gmail-disruption-in-china-could-signal-tighter-control-pc-world-2).

My time mulching leaves on the mower won't change any of that. But it gave me time to think. To process. To consider. To remember the people hurting in so many places around the world today. To focus outside of my own little world, even as I live and work within it.