The bamboo debacle ...

My brother Pat and I were blessed to live in the same home our entire childhood--Mom and Dad bought it when we were born and both lived the rest of their lives there. After Dad passed, Madré continued to take great pride in her home and kept it in wonderful shape, although, it was admittedly a shade dated in some ways (I’m looking at you basement).

Neither Pat nor I live in Vancouver, so when Madré passed, we sold the home. We found out recently that the new owners have torn it down with plans to rebuild. While it was not unexpected, it was a bit sad to know that the home we grew up in is now gone—so many great memories.

It also reminded me of the ‘bamboo debacle’. A ‘growing up episode’ that I shared with D much to her delight.

There was a large bamboo plant in the back yard in a terraced stone wall / planter (the planter portion had a 2-3 foot diameter). Each year in the fall, the bamboo needed to be cut back to its base and each year it would regrow getting 10’ish feet tall.

For reasons that remain unclear to me to this day, dealing with the bamboo somehow became my job (unclear to me since I have a brother who was equally capable of mucking about with the bamboo). Oddly, Pat was also successful positioning me as the one who was responsible for cleaning the gutters—he felt uncomfortable with heights. Spoiler alert, I am VERY UNCOMFORTABLE with heights. Yes, I am a big enough person to admit that I very much love and admire my brother AND, he still has some explaining to do.

I digress. Getting back to the bamboo, cutting it back was a PITA job … it was messy, I always ended up getting soaked (the bamboo contained lots of liquid inside each stalk), and it was a hassle to cut the stalks to length and bundle them up for disposal.

I. Hated. The. Bamboo!

At about the age of 16, I decided that enough was enough and I was going to deal with this bamboo silliness once and for all. In a pique of ingenuity, I waited until Madré was off somewhere, cut it back and then doused the base of the plant with gas. I doused it with A LOT of gas and then I had an impressive bonfire. That bonfire burned hot and for a good amount of time.

Madré always taught us that if you’re going to do a job, you needed to do it right—do work that you’re proud of. So, when the flames went out, I also scrubbed the wall of the planter to get rid of the carbon / soot residue. At the time, doing so seemed important in terms of ‘doing the job right’ and there really was no good reason to advertise my ingenuity.

I was very pleased with myself—I had solved the bamboo issue and would never have to deal with that PITA chore ever again.

The bamboo came back the next year … in fact, Madré made a point of mentioning how healthy it came in using words like ‘lush’ to describe it.

I couldn’t believe it … just couldn’t believe it. What did a person have to do to kill that PITA bamboo—seriously!

When I still lived in Vancouver, we had a tradition where we had Sunday night dinners with each of us hosting the other on alternating weeks. Years and years later, during one of those Sunday dinners, we were sitting on Madre’s back deck, enjoying a glass of wine and each other’s company. Madré shared how happy she was, how much she enjoyed her neighbourhood, her neighbours, her house and how much she enjoyed sitting on the deck appreciating her yard and how she especially liked her bamboo.

I confessed.

Thank goodness bamboo is resilient … it would have been a shame if my plan to kill the bamboo had been successful.

I’m sure that the current owners will build a wonderful new home on their lot. I also suspect that there is a better than even chance that the bamboo will come back. If (when) it does, I hope they enjoy it as much as Madré did.

Note: for the safety conscious among us—N. Van is very wet in the fall … there was zero chance that my localized bonfire was going to spread outside of the stone planter.