Green Grass Blues

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The phrase “unmitigated disaster” comes to mind when people talk about my lawn.

You see, I have many moral and legal obligations to uphold as the male homeowner of a house in the Great American Suburbs:

1. I am required to have at least one SUV in my driveway at all times.

2. I am required to talk about the weather when I meet my neighbors.

3. I must always, always, always maintain and obsess over having a suburban lawn so perfect it belongs in a Sears catalog.

But I’m not really much of a “plant” kind of guy. I have what the ancient Greeks called the “Round-Up” touch where just about any plant I come in contact with shrivels and dies in a matter of days. The only time I’ve ever been accused of having a “green thumb” is when I accidentally stuck my hand in a can of green paint….

I have two big problems with my lawn: the front yard and the back yard. The only reason I don’t have three big problems is because my side yard is a slab of cement and I’ve been able to maintain that quite well, thank you.

My front yard falls into the “good from afar but far from good” category. If you are driving past my front yard at 100mph you might at first think, “Oh, what a nice, green patch of land.”

But when you actually stop and walk across my front lawn you begin to realize that a green lawn doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any grass there. In my case there isn’t. I have plenty of green stuff like small weeds, moss and some sort of strange groundcover plant which can clearly lay claim to being a direct descendant of Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors. This groundcover spreads through my yard faster than “Support Our Troops” bumper ribbon magnets spread across the pickup trucks of Alabama.

I’ve tried just about everything I can to grow grass including seeding, fertilizing, tilling, thatching, aerating, spraying, raking, reseeding, liming, screaming, cursing, drinking, dancing and sacrificing chickens.

It was during one of these lawn work sessions that my elderly neighbor Bob walks over to the end of his property and watches me. Bob has lived in the neighborhood since it was built forty years ago and regular tells bawdy stories about the people who have moved away. Bob needs a hobby.

“Nice weather we’re having….” he begins.

“Yeah, nice and warm. How you doing, Bob?”

“Good. Good. Working on your lawn?” he asks.

No, I just regularly drag a rake around my front lawn when I’m taking a shower. “Yeah, Bob, I guess you caught me.”

“Your pH is all out of wack. And your soil density isn’t ideal. Might try putting down some lime.”

“I did that last year, Bob.”

“Yeah… August 21st is too late to do that. And you can’t do it after a rain. Has to be dry.”

“Umm…okay…”

“Hey, that’s a nice SUV you have there…”

“Thanks, Bob…” I say as I hurry inside and make a mental note to keep the blinds closed in the windows that face Bob’s house.

And though you wouldn’t think it possible, my back yard is actually much worse than my front yard. Why? Because you can see the tragedy of my back yard from outer space.

At the right you see a photo taken by satellite of my neighborhood. It’s a typical suburban setting with trees and houses and roads and all sorts of hanky-panky going on with the milkman during the day.

But, wait! What’s that strange round thing in the photo? Is it a crop circle? Could it be a helicopter landing pad? Is it a piece of dust on the satellite lense? Is it a secret underground missile silo? Nope. Nope. Nope. And probably not.

If you look closely at that round thing you’ll see why my back yard is one of the most craptacular back yards in existence: it has a crater. Like on the moon. Only this crater is filled with sand and stones and various pieces of cement lodged in the ground. I can assure you that it looks about 100 times worse from our back windows than it does from the sky. Dogs yelp and childen weep when they see my back yard.

We’re not sure where the crater even came from. Did a meteor the size of a marble smash into my backyard 50 years ago? Did a mini tornado touch down here at one point? Is it a giant burial site for a prehistoric Pac-Man? My wife thinks it was once the place for an above ground pool. That’s just crazy, of course. She’s also tried to “help” by making suggestions about what I should do about the crater:

“Why don’t you dig out all the sand and stone and fill it in with dirt and grass?”

“Yes, of course,” I respond. “I’ll put that on my list of the 185,000 other things I have to do. Besides, this crater is twenty-five feet round and about 6 inches deep.”

“It doesn’t look that big…”

“That’s because you’re not holding a shovel and standing in the middle of it. And where should I put all that sand and stone once I dig it out?”

“You can’t spread it around the yard?”

I am thankful that my wife does not have have a job involving landscaping.

So I live in a house with a front yard that resembles a science experiment gone bad and a back yard with a crater that can be seen from the space shuttle. I could always napalm the front yard and start from scratch in a year and I could always throw 100 pounds of grass seed on the crater and see what happens.

Then again….there is that can of green paint.

This entry was posted on June 5, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.