We tried to keep the leaves and palm seeds cleaned up around the yard of our new home by ourselves. How hard could it be? Being new to living in the desert, we had no idea. We bought a leaf blower from Home Depot with a large bag attachment that could hold yard debris if we used it in vacuum mode. We tried blowing the yard waste into piles then using the vacuum mode and suck it up until the bag was full. Then we lugged the heavy bag to our large trash can and heaved it up four feet to empty it into the can. After a couple of these bags, the can was full. This wasn’t looking promising, as we had only cleaned a small area, and the rest of the yard was yet to be cleared.
There was also the problem of the desert temperatures during much of the year. It was hovering around 115 during the day. The early mornings seldom dropped below 105, and the late evenings felt as hot as mid-day. We loved our beautiful fruit trees which shaded our house and yard. Two large Ficus Benjaminas trees grew in the front yard and along the western side of the house, providing precious shade from the relentless desert sun.
The trees came with a price, though. The Ficus trees dropped bushels of small leaves and ball-bearing-sized seeds several times a year. The Ficus seeds mixed with the thousands of small seeds dropped by our palm trees to form a rolling hazard all around the yard. One wrong step and your feet would roll right out from under you on those shiny black seed balls, resulting in a nasty fall. The fruit trees also dropped leaves on a regular basis – large ones that could easily hide venomous snakes or scorpions. They absolutely needed to be kept cleaned up, for safety’s sake as well as aesthetics.
One of our neighbors told us about a yard service that they used with much success. We were past the point of giving up trying to manage the yard by ourselves, so we gratefully took down the phone number for a woman named Wanda. She agreed to come by our house and give us an estimate for keeping our yard cleaned up on a regular basis, like she did for several of our other neighbors.
Wanda arrived a few days later in a pick-up truck pulling a flat-bed trailer full of yard implements. She had leaf blowers, brooms, rakes, large plastic barrels, and other miscellaneous equipment. Her two adult sons were riding with her, and another truck followed containing a couple of daughters and daughters-in law, as well. These family members made up her crew. Wanda was about my age – 65, maybe – with long, clean white hair neatly pulled back in a bun. She was very tan with skin as weathered as the desert itself. It was clear she had worked outside in the blazing sun for many, many years. I felt like a complete wimp standing next to this competent woman who was my own age, and who would be doing the work I failed to do myself.
I showed her around our yard and it was clear she could see exactly what needed to be done – even better than I could. She proposed to come once every 2 weeks and clean up all the yard waste, load it into her trailer, and cart it to the dump. Her fee – $15.00. I was shocked that she charged so little for so much work. I hired her on the spot and she and her family crew immediately began working. Wanda put on a large straw sun hat and manned a leaf blower while her kids raked and loaded the piles of yard debris into the plastic barrels. When a barrel was full, one of them would hoist it up on their shoulder, carry it out to the street, and dump it into their trailer. Then they’d bring it back and fill it again – circulating all around the house in an orderly fashion until the yard was completely cleaned. They would accomplish this in about 30 minutes. They each had a particular job and worked together as a seasoned team. They have cleaned our yard for 10 years now.
After the first few weeks of watching them work magic with our yard, I noticed that one of her sons wasn’t “quite right.” I asked my neighbor if she knew what the problem was. She said that he had fallen out of the top of a tall palm tree while trimming it a few years back. It was a miracle he survived at all, but he suffered a lot of brain damage. Wanda later told me that having no insurance, she couldn’t afford for him to stay in a rehabilitation hospital, so she took him home and rehabilitated him herself. She worked with him day after day for over a year, caring for him around the clock. The doctors told her he would probably be a ‘vegetable,’ but she kept at it, and today he can go along with them and empty some of the yard waste bins when he has a good day. She told me her husband would often take care of him during the day when she was off doing their yard cleaning business. Her husband had throat cancer and had his voice box removed, and now speaks through an electronic voice box sounding like Stephan Hawking. After that, he could no longer work outside in the hot sun all day. After learning of this fall, I can’t even watch while his older brother climbs to the top of our 50-foot palm tree to trim it once a year.
Over the last ten years, I have had many occasions to talk with Wanda about her life. She and her husband and children came from Arkansas to the Arizona desert between Phoenix and Tucson to work in the cotton fields. They had done farm work all their lives. There are a few jobs ‘working cotton’ that machinery can’t perform. They were hired to walk all around the perimeter of the fields, which were often two square miles (8 miles around), and clear out brush and weeds from the irrigation ditches using hoes and rakes. They had to be constantly on alert as the ditches were home to desert rattlesnakes and scorpions More than once they were attacked by nests of killer bees lurking in the brush. It was often 115 -120 degrees and they worked in full sun for 8-hour days. She says it was “good work” and they were happy to have the jobs. They were one of the few white people doing this kind of work. Most of the other people were Mexicans, many of them illegals in those days. When they weren’t working cotton, they picked lettuce and other vegetables alongside Mexican migrant workers.
After a few years of living in the greater Phoenix/Tucson area, they moved to Yuma to work in the lettuce fields. Their dream was always to start their own yard business which they did after several more years when their kids were more grown up and could help with the work. She looks at the yard cleaning business as their retirement job – far more stable and less demanding than working in lettuce or cotton fields.
A few years ago, I noticed that one of her daughters – a different one than usually came with them – had an increasingly swelling belly – noticeable because the entire family was rail-thin. After a couple more months, it became obvious she was pregnant. I mentioned to Wanda that she must be happy to have another grandchild on the way. She said this particular daughter had shown up on her doorstep all the way from Texas, with 2 other children in tow, and a vengeful, abusive husband on her trail. They had sought an order of protection from him with the local court and she had filed for a divorce. He often beat her and the children mercilessly, and she was finally leaving him. Wanda took her in and told her she would never let him beat her or the kids again. I believed her. Wanda would be a formidable opponent for anyone – even an enraged male half her age.
When the baby boy was born prematurely, he had multiple birth defects. I noticed the pregnant daughter smoked throughout her pregnancy, as did the entire rest of the family, except for Wanda. I never saw Wanda smoke. Although her skin was clearly sun-damaged by her years of outdoor work in the hot sun, it never had that ‘smoked leather’ look of a long-term smoker. Maybe she had seen enough problems caused by smoking with her other family members to keep her from taking it up. She carried on as always, seeing that her new baby grandson got to his doctor’s appointments on a regular basis. The whole family pulled together to help each of its members.
I once took a check over to her house. She lived in a family compound of 3 small trailers clustered on a 1/4-acre lot in an older, poorer section of the city. I noticed there was a large, well-tended vegetable garden, and lots of flowers and fruit trees planted all around their yard. This was clearly a woman who knew how to help her family survive and stay fed. When she first started working for us, I would overhear her promise them that when they got finished cleaning the yard, they would stop at the mini-mart for a soft-serve ice cream cone. So I began including an extra $5.00 cash with my yard check telling them their ice cream treat was on me this time.
After 3 years of paying them their $15.00 yard cleaning fee, Wanda told me that she reluctantly had to raise their price to $20.00, because the county dump was charging higher fees for commercial yard waste. I began making my checks for $25.00 and continued to give them the $5.00 extra for their ice cream. $20.00 just seemed too small of an amount for the work they did for us.
I have always believed that helping disadvantaged people can be very effective if done on a personal level, as opposed to donating to a large organization with sometimes outrageous overhead. It is easy to look around and see where a need is great. I learned this from my family as I was growing up and watched how they treated the people who worked for them. You can make a positive difference in people’s lives by directly helping them, without making them feel demeaned, and you don’t need to be a Rockefeller to do it. Give them a turkey or ham for their Christmas or Thanksgiving family dinner, as a thank you gift, for example. So many small but effective ways you can directly help. I also take the opportunity to thank them and tell them how much I appreciate and admire their hard work.
A couple months ago, Wanda told me her cancer-stricken husband had passed away last summer. I had no idea. She wiped at tears and I hugged her in sympathy. She said she was very depressed for many months after he died, but then she told herself that she had a big extended family she was now totally responsible for, so she pulled herself together to get on with life. She had a couple of her young grandsons with her that day – out of school for spring break – and with her husband no longer at home to look after them while she worked, she had brought them along and had them helping with the yard. She wanted them to start learning early how to survive by working hard. After watching them work together over these past 10 years, I despair to think about what will happen to them when Wanda is gone someday. She is the glue and inspiration and cruise director for about 20 people – who all completely depend on her guidance and direction.
I included extra cash for extra ice cream cones that day along with my regular yard cleaning payment.
carpyharpy 