Retiring My Hedge Trimmer: Pride, Aging and Paying for Help

Another milestone in aging

This morning, there are young men outside my home blowing leaves and trimming shrubbery. For decades, that has been my job. This year, like every other year, bark dust had to be spread, hedges had to be trimmed, and weeds had to be pulled. As summer wore on, I saw I was not going to get it done.

I am 74. I am still physically able to do the work. I own the equipment. But I no longer want to. I wish I wanted to. I want to want to, but I don’t. In mid-August, I found myself browsing local landscape companies on my computer. Then I hired one.

There was a time when I delighted in taking a long weekend to rent power tools, load them in the back of my pickup truck, and sweat away a couple of days doing home improvement. I built fences and dug French drains. I constructed a retaining wall one summer I was particularly proud of. But when my wife and I bought the house we live in now, we chose one without a lawn. The last time a fence needed replacing, we paid a company to do it for us. It took them less than a day.

I considered the fence a one-time thing. And earlier when I hired a young man from the neighborhood to battle the blackberry bushes down by our creek. I told myself I was doing so he could earn a little extra money.

But hiring a landscape company to do the ordinary summer, fall and weekly maintenance feels like a final capitulation, and I don’t like it.

Our home is one of those in the neighborhood that has parked in front of it once a week a car belonging to a cleaning service. Our Hispanic house cleaners do the heavy cleaning my wife can no longer do and provide me with a weekly reminder of how bad Duolingo has been at teaching me Spanish. In the future, we will also have parked out front the equipment-laden trucks driven by professional landscapers.

Get Orrin Onken’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

The people in my neighborhood are all old, but we give in to our aging at different rates. Hiring someone to trim our bushes is a big one for me.

I am thankful that I can afford to hire landscapers, but feel guilty about spending my money that way. A voice inside me says I should save for when I am older and more retired than I already am. Or that I should use the money instead for a trip to Istanbul or Mali. Or that I will need it for assisted living down the road.

But I don’t want to go to Istanbul or Mali, and I am in greater danger of dying or becoming completely disabled with all those savings still sitting in the account than I am of being unable to pay for long-term care when I am old old.

My parents, children of the Great Depression, guarded their savings until they were no longer capable of spending, and thereafter died with those savings still safely in the account. I am their child and very much like them. My financial advisor thinks I should work harder at spending what I have saved, but I haven’t known him nearly as long as I knew my parents.

I worry that if I don’t go out and work on the property, I will get out of shape. I will get fat and die. That the exercise I get from doing it is what is keeping me alive, and that without it, I will keel over dead. I sound to myself like those people who warned me that if I quit practicing law, boredom or alcoholism would overwhelm me and I'd be dead within a year. They weren’t even close to getting it right, but maybe the “you must keep gardening” people have better information.

Instead of paying for landscapers, I could let my house run down. When practicing elder law, I encountered a lot of cases of elders trapped in a home that they owned but could not maintain, a home that fell apart around them, a home that became so dangerous they had to be removed by firm but kind agents of Adult Protective Services.

Yeah, that won’t be me. We don’t hoard. What maintenance we can’t do, we can afford to pay for and when we decide to move to long-term care — which we fully intend to do someday — the proceeds from selling a well-kept house will pay for a lot of services.

It’s fear of the unknown. Of something different. But I got used to the housekeepers and now look forward to seeing them on Tuesday mornings. I suspect that soon enough, it will be the same with the young men who come to trim my hedges.

Sign up here to receive our free weekly newsletter featuring the best of Crow’s Feet: Life as We Age