Deeply Rooted Issues

My husband and I are approaching the 1 year mark of when we bought our house (hooray!).  I like to think that buying a fixer-upper house is like having another child.  It seriously feels like that sometimes.  I'm really proud of the work we've done on it but boy is it a lot of work!

Anyway....when we first bought our house there was a GINORMOUS tree in the backyard. I'm all for trees and shade and all the jazz but this tree was seriously toxic.  It had made a huge mess of the backyard.  The roots to this thing literally went the whole length of the backyard, so 40-50 feet long.  The roots were lifting up the cement to our carport, made it almost impossible to open the gate, and messed up the stairs to the deck. One of the roots even put a crack in the foundation!

(The pictures don't really give it justice)

So one of the first things we did when we bought the house is hired a company to come cut the tree down. That thing was a beast.  The guy who cut it down even said that he "under bid" us and that it was way harder than he expected.  About $3,500 dollars later (ouch) they had cut down the tree.  That also included grinding down the roots and leaving a mountain of mulch in it's wake (P.S. we have free mulch if anyone wants it....I'm totally serious).  We even had to use a jackhammer to break up some of the concrete so that the tree company could get to the roots.  Since then we've been trying to fix up the backyard (a slow, grueling process) and working to get the dirt ready to plant grass seed. This has required cleaning up a lot of junky stuff, tilling the dirt, etc.

(The tree company cutting it down last fall....it took about 3 days)

(This is just one little section of the tree!)

(What the roots looked like UNDER the concrete)

(This is the stump before they ground it down....you can see how long and deep the roots are!)

Just the other day my husband went out with some kind of pick-looking tool (not sure what it's called) and worked on tilling the dirt.  As he got started he realized that there are still more roots in the ground from that devil tree that we didn't see before.  He spent a lot of the morning digging the roots out so that we can get it prepared for grass.

(I really wish I could use a time machine and go back 30 years to tell the homeowners to cut down the tree now before it gets out of control!).

(Love my son's little hand poking out at the bottom, haha)

So here's the point of my post (I'm getting there, I promise):

As I stood on our back deck looking at the yard at the roots my husband had recently dug out, it got me thinking about counseling (my brain tends to automatically go there for some reason).  I was thinking about how roots are similar to psychological and emotional issues. That's why you sometimes hear people refer to them at "deeply-rooted" issues.  Most of our "issues" are buried under the surface, and sometimes we don't even know they are there, or at least we're not super aware of them.  For some of us those issues are small and with a little bit of work we can get them to the surface.  For others those issues are large and deeply-rooted, similar to our tree.  It's difficult to get them to the surface and unless we get them taken care of they can do a lot of damage. But I've realized that in order to become "healthy" again, and to allow good things (like grass) to grow, we have to get those buried issues up to the surface.  And sometimes it's A LOT of work.  And it's a long, slow process.  But as we get those issues out, we allow for something beautiful to take it's place.

(Insert "After" picture of beautiful backyard.....maybe next year *sigh*).