We named it Steve

"I wouldn't be so afraid of it if I just knew what it was called."
"Let's call it 'Steve'."
"Steve?"
"It's a nice name."
"Yeah, I'm much less afraid of 'Steve'."

I started with pruning the peach tree.

Our new home came with a very productive and woefully neglected peach tree that looked like it hadn't been pruned since Moses first planted it. Saturday morning I grabbed my pruning saw, my pruners, my Boy, and my wife's gardening gloves and went to work. The only problem was that on the one side, there was an overgrown rose bush with foot-long thorns that made it hazardous to prune that half of the tree. After reaching around it for ten minutes or so, I decided it would easier to simply prune the rose bush, then finish the tree. Well, I got a bit aggressive on the pruning of the bush and left about one inch sticking above the ground.

Had that been the whole story, Steve never would have come into being. However, as I was...um..."pruning" the rose bush, a neighboring rose bush kept poking me. Deliberately. Enough so that, when explaining my ensuing actions to Neesha, the phrase "It kind of pissed me off, really," was my sole justification. Seven rose bushes, one shrub shaped like a flying saucer, one ugly tree, two very dusty bushes, and prunings from five other trees later, Steve was born.

mw