The Green Green &^%$##$ Grass of Home
A recent blog post from a young relative of mine (see: Superior Lawn Care Tips
http://nottotallyinept.blogspot.com/) has partially restored my faith in the younger generation. In the post he describes how as a new home owner he had neglected his lawn long for so long that an anonymous neighbor took care of the task for him. To this young relative, I say, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'. If the lad lived closer I should feel it my duty, nay my honor, to clasp him to my bosom with unbridled avuncular pride and affection. For he has repeated in his own way an old and valued family tradition of lawn apathy.
In fact I was roughly his age when I too looked out my window to see my neighbor mowing MY lawn. When I asked him what he was about, he answered that he was anxious to “try out his new lawn mower.” He was a gentlemanly fellow and this statement may be the biggest whopper he ever told. In any case, I was seized with two emotions. On the one hand, he had invaded my castle (or at least the moat area) which I resented. On the other hand I now had my lawn mowed! Needless to say, this latter fact pretty much trumped emotion number one in less time than it takes to yank a Briggs & Stratton starting cord.
My father was perhaps the only person who hated lawns more than I do. When I was old enough (6?) he foisted the job off on me, his oldest son, and I’ve labored under that onerous yoke ever since, not being “blessed with male issue” myself. After I left home my younger brother inherited the task and regarded it with a similar revulsion. When he was around 13 he was asked by an elderly neighbor if he would like to earn some money by mowing her lawn as well as his own. He turned it down, stating, “I think I’ve got enough to take care of with my own lawn.” Little did he know at the time that eight years earlier I had responded with those exact words to another elderly neighbor who had been foolish enough make a similar proposition to me. As you can well imagine, these two incidents have served to strengthen our mutual admiration and respect over the years.
I am not one of those people who take delight at skewering every aspect of American culture and habit so that I can be seen as an enlightened citizen of the world. But I do have to admit that this business of fussing over one’s lawn is a little piece of Americana that can go by the boards as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have any realistic hopes about this, however. Here’s a little snippet from a piece that appeared in Life Magazine in the late 1960’s:
“Let a man drink or default, cheat on his taxes or cheat on his wife, and the community will find forgiveness in its heart. But let him fail to keep his front lawn mowed, and to be seen doing it, and those hearts will turn to stone. For the American front lawn is a holy place, constantly worshiped but never used. Only its high priest, the American husband, may set foot on it, and then only to perform the sacred rites: mowing with a mower, edging with an edger, sprinkling with a hose, and rooting with a rooter to purify the temple of profane weeds.”
Now, a good part of my aversion to lawns and lawn care can be chalked up to pure laziness so I might as well admit that from the get go. But besides that there’s the complete futility of the thing. I mean, what’s the bloody point to this mind numbing work? And it’s not enough that the stuff be kept short. It needs to be all of one species even if it means pouring poison all over the thing lest some foreign plant work its way into the neighborhood. Is there any purer form of bigotry than this? Does having a few dandelions, crab grass, or creeping charlie really make playing less fun for kids? It only looks bad because we’ve been conditioned to associate uniformity with beauty. If dandelions were difficult to grow, there’d be whole companies given over to making them more robust. I say if you’re going to have a lawn (still an open question as far as I‘m concerned), let diversity rule the day!
I read recently that part of the American love affair with lawns is the result of our love affair with golf. Snobby golfers liked the looks of the neatly trimmed greens and decided they had to have the same kind of stuff gracing their properties. Should we be surprised that the world’s silliest sport has thus given rise to America’s silliest outdoor activity?
I was going to end this with a parody aimed at lawn care based on Markham’s poem, “The Man With the Hoe.” After I re-read the original work, however, I found I only needed to make one small word substitution. The next time you push that ridiculous cutting machine around or see one of your neighbors doing it, see if this stanza doesn’t ring true:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his mower and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
OK, OK, so that's a bit much. But it IS the way I feel when I'm mowing the freakin' lawn!
http://nottotallyinept.blogspot.com/) has partially restored my faith in the younger generation. In the post he describes how as a new home owner he had neglected his lawn long for so long that an anonymous neighbor took care of the task for him. To this young relative, I say, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'. If the lad lived closer I should feel it my duty, nay my honor, to clasp him to my bosom with unbridled avuncular pride and affection. For he has repeated in his own way an old and valued family tradition of lawn apathy.
In fact I was roughly his age when I too looked out my window to see my neighbor mowing MY lawn. When I asked him what he was about, he answered that he was anxious to “try out his new lawn mower.” He was a gentlemanly fellow and this statement may be the biggest whopper he ever told. In any case, I was seized with two emotions. On the one hand, he had invaded my castle (or at least the moat area) which I resented. On the other hand I now had my lawn mowed! Needless to say, this latter fact pretty much trumped emotion number one in less time than it takes to yank a Briggs & Stratton starting cord.
My father was perhaps the only person who hated lawns more than I do. When I was old enough (6?) he foisted the job off on me, his oldest son, and I’ve labored under that onerous yoke ever since, not being “blessed with male issue” myself. After I left home my younger brother inherited the task and regarded it with a similar revulsion. When he was around 13 he was asked by an elderly neighbor if he would like to earn some money by mowing her lawn as well as his own. He turned it down, stating, “I think I’ve got enough to take care of with my own lawn.” Little did he know at the time that eight years earlier I had responded with those exact words to another elderly neighbor who had been foolish enough make a similar proposition to me. As you can well imagine, these two incidents have served to strengthen our mutual admiration and respect over the years.
I am not one of those people who take delight at skewering every aspect of American culture and habit so that I can be seen as an enlightened citizen of the world. But I do have to admit that this business of fussing over one’s lawn is a little piece of Americana that can go by the boards as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have any realistic hopes about this, however. Here’s a little snippet from a piece that appeared in Life Magazine in the late 1960’s:
“Let a man drink or default, cheat on his taxes or cheat on his wife, and the community will find forgiveness in its heart. But let him fail to keep his front lawn mowed, and to be seen doing it, and those hearts will turn to stone. For the American front lawn is a holy place, constantly worshiped but never used. Only its high priest, the American husband, may set foot on it, and then only to perform the sacred rites: mowing with a mower, edging with an edger, sprinkling with a hose, and rooting with a rooter to purify the temple of profane weeds.”
Now, a good part of my aversion to lawns and lawn care can be chalked up to pure laziness so I might as well admit that from the get go. But besides that there’s the complete futility of the thing. I mean, what’s the bloody point to this mind numbing work? And it’s not enough that the stuff be kept short. It needs to be all of one species even if it means pouring poison all over the thing lest some foreign plant work its way into the neighborhood. Is there any purer form of bigotry than this? Does having a few dandelions, crab grass, or creeping charlie really make playing less fun for kids? It only looks bad because we’ve been conditioned to associate uniformity with beauty. If dandelions were difficult to grow, there’d be whole companies given over to making them more robust. I say if you’re going to have a lawn (still an open question as far as I‘m concerned), let diversity rule the day!
I read recently that part of the American love affair with lawns is the result of our love affair with golf. Snobby golfers liked the looks of the neatly trimmed greens and decided they had to have the same kind of stuff gracing their properties. Should we be surprised that the world’s silliest sport has thus given rise to America’s silliest outdoor activity?
I was going to end this with a parody aimed at lawn care based on Markham’s poem, “The Man With the Hoe.” After I re-read the original work, however, I found I only needed to make one small word substitution. The next time you push that ridiculous cutting machine around or see one of your neighbors doing it, see if this stanza doesn’t ring true:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his mower and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
OK, OK, so that's a bit much. But it IS the way I feel when I'm mowing the freakin' lawn!
posted by unca | 6:30 PM
3 Comments:
This is a great post Unca! I can really relate to you and your brother.
I was looking on line for an article I read recently about lawn care and I stumbled on this article by Robert Fulford (A writer from Toronto Canada) I think you will enjoy.
Here is part of it:
This can only breed guilt in those who allow their lawns to degenerate. And among neighbours, dandelions spread another kind of moral blight: they encourage the prig, the tattler, and the common scold. They provide the stuff of malicious gossip, causing people who should be minding their own business to peer through slits in drawn curtains and make vicious phone calls. Eventually they bring a harsh judgement crashing down on everyone: they lower the value of property. A Sunset magazine guidebook, How to Install and Care for Your Lawn, once neatly defined the role of the lawn as moral arbiter: "a lawn has a spiteful way of exposing the lax gardener to his neighbours by turning brown, sprouting weeds, or looking generally shaggy and woebegone." You can fool yourself, your children, perhaps even your spouse; you cannot fool your lawn.
Quite aside from environmental issues, lawns are not universally loved. There are those who find large stretches of grass intimidating, and often they are Europeans, immigrants from countries that have not made lawns central to their culture. Eva Hoffman, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, wrote in her much-admired memoir, Lost in Translation, about her father feeling beaten down by Vancouver in the 1960s. He had endured the Nazis, he had endured the communists, but the lawns of Vancouver were too much for him, he was "confounded by this amiable Vancouver, by its civility and its shaved lawns." The lawns were merely a symbol, of course, but a potent and omnipresent one---in their uniform richness they could make someone feel guilty for the crime of failing to succeed.
The rest of the article can be found at www.robertfulford.com/lawn.html
I had no idea I was joining a proud legacy! I guess it was just instinct, I don't know what to say. This is truly a momentous day. Unca, if only we lived next door to each other, we could...create the ugliest looking street in America, or something. I don't know. What I do know is that you and I are both destined for greater things in this life than lawn-mowing. It's like we were designated as the chosen ones by a higher power. I think that's where the majority of our neighbors' displeasure stems from, jealousy over not being the chosen ones. Oh well, suckers!!
This is funny. MY neighbor mows my lawn too, and so does one of my good friend's! But my friend and I sort of have a deal with our neighbors -- in my case, I don't even have a lawnmower and the lawn is small, so he told me he'd do it when we all moved in. I occasionally bake him chocolate chip cookies. (Now I've even moved and am selling the house, but he stills mows the lawn -- I guess maybe when escrow closes, he might stop.) If I actually had a lawnmower, I guess I wouldn't mind mowing that much. But the thing is, lawnmowers cost like hundreds of dollars. Do you have any idea how many pairs of shoes you can get instead of just one lawnmower????!
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