You Don't Want Me as Your Neighbor

I'm one of those terrible neighbors. We have no grass in our front yard. Well, that's not quite true--there's crab grass here and there, mostly by the sloping curb, and it makes my chest swell. It's long and reed-like and needs to be mowed, but sadly, it's the best part of our yard.

The rest of the yard is a dusty chalk of mud, but it's not even good mud, because there are no mounds or texture, only a smooth surface that looks like the work of a paint roller. The worst of it sits at the top of our upward climbing yard, so that this eyesore is all the more visible.

In April I planted a weeping willow in the middle of this square of a yard, with the hope that--in a year or two--it would cover at least some of my sins, with pinestraw or mulch and a little rounded wall lying beneath the tree in its shadow.

The bushes on the perimeter of the yard would look better if I could keep them from their Amazonian sprawl. But this impossible as I keep cutting through the power cord with my hedge trimmer each time I started in on them. It gets expensive when you pay $36 for a 10-minute, incomplete session.

When we moved in seven years ago, there was grass, but as we hit our first spring I realized that the shoots were merely dusty grafts clinging to netting. I tried to improve the situation, but in my eventual frustration I tore everything out to start fresh. Then nothing grew. We've sodded, scattered, and raked in seedlings, but our success is very modest and quickly dies. We've cut down trees to give ourselves more sun, then wished we'd left them up so the yard didn't get so dry. I've destroyed bushes to plant flower beds, only to discover robust gardens of grass where the bushes once sat.

Our meager shoots and burgeoning crabgrass have grown long and scraggly, and are sorely in need of trimming. The lawnmower I bought for the house stopped working after one season, and rather than hunt down a mechanic or buy a new one, we've been weed-wacking the grasslings and dragging a spinning, chopping machine at the grass. It doesn't work, and now the handle is coming off.

It's hard to believe I'm descended from a mechanical family--my paternal grandfather the proud owner of a small engine repair shop where I whiled away the hours as a young boy, sitting on lawnmowers, listening to my grandfather's belly laughs.

Comments

[Darnell Lamb]

A sad, sad tale of suburban homeowner woe.