The lilacs.

Along the back edge of our property is a wall of bushy, overgrown lilacs.  They're so high they're reaching into the power lines, and they fall over into the easement between our property and the neighbor's behind us.  Like everything else on our property, they've been let go for ages and are unruly and intimidating.  And while we're putting off a majority of the yard work for the fall, the lilacs needed to be trimmed to make way for a fence.  So I mentioned to my mom that I needed to trim the lilacs, and we ignorantly thought we could tackle them ourselves.

A look at the lilacs from the back corner of our house.  That's my mom.  She's 5' 2".

So this evening my parents came over to trim the lilacs with me.  My dad brought lots of heavy equipment that I thought was surely overkill.  I mean, they were just lilacs, right?  Wrong.  I attempted to use some loppers to cut off an unruly branch and the lilacs laughed at me.  It quickly turned into a full-on assault on those lilacs, with my dad lopping and hacking away and not just branches but practically whole trees.  My mother and I stayed busy clearing away the giant limbs and piling them in the back yard.  And those branches just kept coming and coming.

My dad, making progress on that jungle of branches.

It was ridiculously hot, sweaty, miserable work.  My poor dad got the worst of it, stuck underneath the lilacs, hacking away at the neverending limbs.  At one point, my neighbor brought my dad a much-needed beer (have I mentioned that so far, the neighbors I've met have been awesome?).  All in all, we spent about two hours taming those beastly lilacs.  Amazingly, my dad survived without being swallowed whole by all the invasive mulberry branches trying to take over the lilacs.  My dad was drenched in sweat, I'm now covered in tumor-like mosquito bites, and my mother... well, my mother walked away just as cute and clean as when she'd started.

But look, room for a fence!

Hooray, even more spots where we'll have to try to grow grass...

And look here's the mess we left behind:

So many branches!  And look, there's corn growing in the flower box!

See my dad back there? 

Tomorrow (Friday) the posts for the fence will be set, and by Monday the rest of the fence will be finished.  Later this fall we'll go back and clean up the lilacs more--trim the tops, the front, and clean out around them.  But for now we've all had enough lilacs to last for a while.

Update: Turns out, there was some horribly inconspicuous poison ivy growing in the far left lilac bush. It was only discovered after my mother returned home and was overcome with a miserable, itchy rash all over. Brandan also experienced the misery that is poison ivy the next summer. I've since cut down and hopefully killed all remaining traces of said poison ivy, although I keep a close eye on the lilacs for any sign of its return.