The first path begins to take shape

One day last week, plus a spare hour in between monsoons/horse time/housework over the weekend, three blissfully rain-free hours tonight and my first path has shape.  I used my Fiskars steel tiller to break up the centipede grass and get those roots exposed.  I hand tilled the path halfway from the brick walk to the Sweet Gum that first day.  During the spare hour, I re-tilled to further expose the root systems.  It's so hard to get rid of this grass; one does not simply pull it out just as one does not simply walk into Mordor.  And you can't use the cut-n-scrape method of normal turf.  At least I've never successfully done it.  So tonight I continued to till the whole way to the Sweet Gum and I picked up the now dead grass from the first section.

You can see the shape of the meandering path, one of the famous roots, and what dead centipede grass looks like (it's that brown circle in the foreground).  You can also see my Chinese elm and azzie babies, alongside some ANNOYING fallen Spanish moss.  The base of the Sweet Gum is crazed with lunatic lantanas, baby Sweet Gums and baby Live Oaks, thanks to the squirrels.  That will all have to go.

Before the next monsoon arrived, I was able to transplant my two pink hydrangeas from in front of the porch to the protection of the Sweet Viburnum.  Neighbors passing by complimented me on my dedication to the process.  They'd been watching.  Yikes.

I decided to stomp down the freshly turned dirt on my new path and then I walked the other imaginary paths until the wind arrived.  The Spanish moss was flying at near horizontal degrees as I thought, "Shall I walk on, or shall I seek shelter?"  I apparently chose the wrong option because Mother Nature whacked my forehead with Sweet Gum debris.  Shelter it was, then.

This storm traveled the whole way from the Gulf to grace us with its presence.  Most of our monsoons are of the pop-up variety.  Make no mistake, I am not complaining about these storms. They are infinitely better than The Storms Which Shall Not Be Named.