Ray's Thought for the Day - Clear the Dang Brush

What can be done when one is feeling a tad morose or down about the mouth, as it were? Well, like the Kinglet, I go out and cut some brush. Either that or take a couple of Alka Seltzer. Alka Seltzer always cheers me up. It's so effervescent. But this time I chose to clear some brush. At the CB we never let unwanted brush get very big. Consequently, when we clear brush, we use hand snips. The brush that got cleared was mostly Celtis laevigata and Ulmus crassifolia seedlings, some of them nearly two feet tall. They seed out along the east fencerow where the habitat begins to grade into what would probably be hackberry-elm woodland. But that's a marginal call because most of the big hackberries and elms just east proximally succumbed to drought a few years ago. Anyway, those saplings got cut mainly because they are not what we want in that location aesthetically speaking, preferring a shrub, grass and sedge dominated understory. The shrubs are Ilex decidua, Ilex vomitoria, Symphoricarpus orbiculata, Rhus triloba, Rhus lanceolata, Callicarpa americana and some subshrubs, Solanum triquetrum and Malvaviscus arboreus. Then there are about 25 different grasses and sedges and a bunch of native herbs and vines.

Now that I have actually cleared some brush I feel lots better. But the prospect of clearing more brush is not as appealing as a nice fizzy Alka Seltzer libation. However, I shall have lotsa trouble convincing Red that the Alka Seltzer libation will do just as well as clearing the rest of the brush. So here I go out again to clear some more brush, less enthusiastic than formerly.

The above should be expressed as a Druid dichotomy, thusly. What is your druthers, clear brush or a soothing libation?