Top 5 rules for bushwhacking

1. Wear good gloves. I like these because they come in extra-small – a perfect fit – AND they come in orange, which makes them easier to find when you accidentally leave them lying around somewhere in the grass.

2. Wear long sleeves. Otherwise, scratches.

3. Drink lots of water. If you don't, you will wake up the next morning with a dehydration headache.

4. If you're going to be at it for an hour or more, it's okay to have something nice and carby before you start. In fact, you probably should do that – it's hard work!

5. Be sure to stop well before sundown, so the birds and other assorted creatures have time to check out the revised space before they have to settle in for the night.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours getting started on a project I've been wanting to do for the longest time: clearing out some of the dead wood that's been accumulating for years and years in the back field. It's mostly dead coyote bush, so old and rotten a piece as big around as your arm will break off in your hand with just a tug.

Mr. A and I have been having a philosophical disagreement about how much dead wood is necessary as wildlife habitat and how much it might be possible to remove, or at least consolidate into piles, in order to create some semblance of order out there ... although I realize that a natural, wild oak woodland isn't necessarily what you might call an "orderly" kind of landscape ... and maybe if we were trying to maintain the land in its purely native form it would be better to just let the dead wood fall and rot where it lands (which, by the way, is mostly what we are doing, anyway).

But if this were a purely natural native landscape it would not be overrun with fennel and star thistle, which it is starting to be, and since I've gotten him to agree to let me try to eradicate these invasive non-native plants, I just feel like ... well dammit, I'm not asking to turn the place into Hidcote Manor.* I just want to tidy it up a bit.

I'm a little afraid he's going to be mad when he sees how much I did out there. But I did make a point not to destroy thickets or copses where animals had clearly been nesting. And I haven't moved any of the piles to the back of the property yet, either. So if he wants to build critter condos out of the wood, he can.

Slowly but surely I am starting to assert myself enough to feel like this is at least partly my place, too. It's been a long time coming.

* That's the picture at the top up there. This is more where we're heading with our landscape.