I went up the ladder anyway — and the boxwoods look great

Nobody told me not to go up the ladder when I was younger.

Last weekend I dragged out the eight-foot ladder to trim the three boxwoods in the backyard. They're over twenty feet tall. I'm six-foot-one and a half. Standing on the top rung with my arms stretched overhead I could almost reach the top. My logic was simple — if I fell forward, the boxwood would catch me. Like that meme where Homer Simpson disappears into the shrubbery.

My wife told me not to do it when she wasn't home. My co-workers told me not to go up on the ladder at all. I did it anyway. Linda found out after.

Nobody said any of this to me twenty years ago. That's the part that stays with me.

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The yard as a second language

I do my own yard work. Always have. Not because I have to, not because I'm saving money — though I am — but because there is something deeply satisfying about working your own ground that no landscaping crew can replicate for you.

Spring especially. The yard in spring is a symphony and if you're paying attention you get to watch every movement. The daffodils open first, then the forsythia goes yellow along the fence. The tulips follow. Then the redbud blooms purple against the sky and the dogwood opens white and the whole thing builds like something that was planned by someone much smarter than me. Linda knows every note of this by heart. I just try to keep up.

There is a particular satisfaction in mowing your own lawn that I have never been able to fully explain to someone who has never done it. The geometry of it. The immediate visible result. The smell. You push the mower in straight lines and when you turn around you can see exactly what you just accomplished. There is almost nothing else in adult life that works that cleanly and that fast.

When you're done you sit on the patio and take it all in. The whole yard. Everything trimmed, everything cut, everything where it belongs. A cold drink. Quiet. That is a feeling you cannot hire out.

The ladder question

Most of my neighbors don't do their own yard work. That's just a fact of life in New Jersey in 2026 — landscaping crews are everywhere on weekends, the leaf blowers running from dawn to dusk. I understand it. People are busy. Life is complicated. But something gets lost when you hand all of it over.

I'm not ready to hand it over.

The ladder thing — look, I understand the concern. Eight feet of aluminum, top rung, arms extended, boxwoods that have been growing since before I moved in. My co-workers weren't wrong. My wife Linda wasn't wrong. But those boxwoods needed trimming and they weren't going to trim themselves and the alternative was paying someone else to do something I am perfectly capable of doing myself.

Use it or lose it. That is not just something people say. It is an actual philosophy of getting older that I believe in completely. The day I stop climbing ladders because someone told me not to is the day something shifts that I am not ready to have shift.

The boxwoods look great, by the way.