I actually enjoy working on our little house. I was inordinately proud of myself when I fixed the leaky faucet in the kitchen, for instance, or when I replaced the fugly chandelier in the dining room.

Sarah was always my cheering squad; she just loved that I was so handy. When she moved in with me, I noticed that her bookshelf was about to fall apart, so I laid it on its side, glued it back together and piled some weights on it to help it hold until the glue dried. It wasn’t much, but she was just thrilled by how matter-of-fact I was about it. It was busted, I fixed it, no big deal.

That said, there are a few things about home ownership that I do not enjoy. One of them is yard care. When we bought the house, it came with what is euphemistically known as “mature landscaping.” The wisteria had swallowed the back fence and was working on the maple tree. It had torn down the gutter downspout and was working its way into the bedroom window.

Wisteria, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is insidious. It grows inches a day and can span great distances by twining around itself. I saw it reach up a good six feet into thin air to climb back into the maple tree after I cut it down. It will strangle you in your sleep if you aren’t careful. Sarah insisted that it was beautiful when it bloomed, but after three years, it never did. Last summer, she was no longer around to defend it, and I cut it to the ground. It’s still there, but I think I have the upper hand. I just can’t countenance a plant that requires twenty-four hour supervision to prevent it from killing all the other plants and lifting my house off its foundation.

We have a glorious star magnolia in the front yard that just finished its annual florgasm. We have many healthy hostas. We have an extremely enthusiastic honeysuckle that has almost completely devoured the yew bush on the corner. We have a bunch of nearly-dead rhododendrons that I am not sure what to do with. (I didn’t even know that rhododendrons were supposed to flower until I saw a picture a few weeks ago.) And we have at least a hundred other plants, bushes and flowers that I cannot identify, to the extent of being unable to tell whether they are weeds or not, or even whether they are alive or not.

One of my neighbors is a gardener, and he was kind enough to point out that I had some six-foot milkweeds growing out front: “Those are weeds, by the way.” Good to know. I ripped them out, and darn if they didn’t grow right back. Last summer, every night, as soon as we got home, we would go over to the honeysuckle corner and search for milkweed shoots.

A little research revealed that milkweed is a rhizome. I picture it as an evil snake that lurks far below, sending up shoots but never revealing its true self. I don’t know how it manages to survive with no sunlight, because I get those shoots the second they break the surface. But they keep coming.

So, I am slowly learning what I don’t like: plants that will take over my entire yard if I don’t pay close attention to them. Milkweed, bad. Wisteria, bad. Hostas I like, because they stay where you put them. I know enough to uproot maple seedlings before they get too big. But I don’t even know what else is thriving in my yard, plotting to destroy me.

Finally, we have a little garden out back. Strawberries, tulips, maybe some chives. Raised beds, a fence. It was beautiful, once. It could be again, but it needs a lot of work, and someone to care for it. I can take direction, but Sarah was the gardener of the family. She fed and watered; she nurtured and pruned; she sang little growing songs. Now termites have eaten the fence, and the weeds grow up to the sky.