Brush Clearing and Rust Belts

Two ways to tame the dragon.

For today’s purposes, the dragon stands for the sickness of too many ideas.

One of my favorite ways to ease my sickness of too many ideas is to clear brush.

The cacophony of too many projects and plans often threatens to eat me up and the free-flowing spigot simply must be shut off sometimes.

Doing battle with invasive vines and deadfall with my loppers and girl chainsaw has been a chosen therapy for most of my life. Bittersweet, grapevine, Japanese knotweed, stilt grass, and the unmanageable and poorly named tree of heaven. If left to themselves, the invasives take the places of the ones that have always been; oak, ash, sassafras, walnut, and sugar maples. They suffocate and strangle. They are boa constrictors squatting on our precious eleven acres.

The destructive path of the invasives, both flora and fauna, is with us every day. The emerald ash borer took out every last one of The Ruins ash trees. We now use their dead carcasses for our wood stove heat through the winter. But we als…