I have become a redneck.

We had a beautiful Christmas weekend with no clouds and temperatures in the high seventies. We finished our familial holidays early and went to the lake for two days. I should have worn a brimmed hat instead of a baseball cap because the back of my neck is a bright red now.

The project I was working on there is a restoration of part of the land that the previous owner cleared in order to create a horse pasture. This will be a continuing effort that I will write about from time to time, so it might be a good idea for me to give you an idea of what the area looks like.

It is a fenced-off rectangle of about an acre, about four times as long as it is narrow. Aerial photographs show that as recently as five years ago about three-fourths of it was covered with trees. Now it is mostly grassland, with a few larger trees left, primarily at one of the narrow ends of the rectangle.

At the western edge of the property the land is rocky and desert-like. The grass is short and sparse with lots of bare soil and rock. This is the area that does not show any trees in aerial photographs. This area abuts the main road. An old-timer in the area says that about 20 years ago the highway department stored materials on this area while working on the road that passes by our property. There is no sign of the road material now, but if the land was scraped clean it could account for the lack of soil. The topography here is also somewhat of a shallow bowl. After heavy rains I have encountered standing water in a few places. There is some cactus in this area and a few junipers about 12 to 18 inches tall.

Moving eastward the ground rises slightly and the grass becomes more luxuriant. There are a few scraggly mesquites in this area, mostly under six feet. They all show signs of deer having rubbed their antlers against the trunks. Some limbs have their bark rubbed off and other limbs are mangled. In this are we also start to see a few sprouts of oak and elm that are coming up from roots of the old trees that were once here. Most are no more than a foot tall.

About in the middle of the property a few nice-sized oak trees have been spared. There are even more of the oaks and elms resprouting here and some of these are as much as two or three feet tall.

As we pass the middle the ground begins sloping downward again and the grass becomes knee high. I don’t know much about grasses but I think this is some kind of bermuda. It does not look native. There do not seem to be any of the resprouting trees in this swath. Perhaps the grass here is too thick.

Then finally toward the eastern edge the land begins to slope rather extremely toward the northeast. Quite a few trees have been left here and once again there are resprouting oaks and elms. Some of these are as much as four feet tall. The grass here is tall also but it is a different grass. It is more of a bunchgrass with big seedheads and bare ground can be seen between the bunches.