Ah, the green, green grass of home

One of the great pains of my childhood was mowing the grass. Actually, any manual labor was sort of a pain to me, but mowing the grass was especially tiresome.

From the time I was 7 years old until the time I turned 16, we lived in a rental house with a large front yard of mostly bahia grass — a hardy, aggravating grass with ugly little shoots that grows about as fast as a kudzu vine. That meant that just a couple of days after mowing the whole yard, those aggravating shoots were at it again, waving in the hot summer breeze and taunting me.

My dad will deny it today, but he often would inspect the yard when I was through mowing it. If he found a blade of grass — or, worse, one of those stupid bahia shoots — I’d have to mow the whole yard again. I guess he figured he was teaching me to strive for perfection and a job well done, but it really just taught me to hate grass.

One day my next-door-neighbor decided to kill an ant bed by pouring gasoline on it and then setting it ablaze. I guess their grass was fairly dry because most of their front yard went up in flames and was a nice shade of black ash for a little while.

“Hey, David!” I remember yelling. “I think I’ve got a few ant beds in my yard, too.” Unfortunately, my dad wasn’t interested in David’s incredibly effective ant-killing methodology.

I swore that when I got older, I would live in the city, the concrete jungle where the only grass was the kind sold by guys in trenchcoats on the corner. At the very least, if I had to live in the suburbs in a regular house, I’d either lay down artificial turf or pour concrete over the entire front yard and paint it green.

Alas, I grew up — physically if not mentally. The older I get, the less I like cities over a population of, say, 800. Not only do I not want to live in one, but I’m a little less inclined to visit one with each passing day.

I want quiet. I’m now on a cul-de-sac with the only traffic the occasionally lost person in our subdivision. We purposefully selected a lot with protected wetlands and forest behind us. For now, the lots on each side of us have yet to be cleared of trees to make way for new homes. The hill behind us is full of crape myrtles, azaleas, knockout roses, crabapple trees and all kinds of other plants whose scientific names I can’t pronounce — not to mention all the hardwoods and pines that we were able to spare in building our home.

This past Saturday, we put the final touches on the greenery around the house by laying out a pallet of sod over the last remaining ugly spot. Yes, after much sweat and hard work, most of our ground is covered with grass.

It’s a hybrid centipede grass that is very manageable, low-growing and drought-tolerant. They bill it as “lazy man’s grass,” which, naturally, captured my attention. Still, it does require cutting. So, 40 years after grass became my enemy, we’ve patched things up.

My dad even let us borrow his trailer to go pick up the pallet of sod. It could be some scheme he hatched with my wife to make me somehow appreciate the manual labor of grass-cutting. I guess it’s kind of like the failed drug war: After decades of failure, they keep at it and even ramp up the efforts despite making no progress. Likewise, I’ll never enjoy cutting the grass.

But I do now finally enjoy the smell of a freshly cut lawn. And I can plug in headphones and listen to Steely Dan to drown out the annoying sound of the mower.

And I’m careful not to miss a single blade of grass while I’m cutting, even as a grown-up. Besides, I still have a fear that my work could be inspected at any moment, and my wife is even more persnickety than my dad … with better vision.

And there’s no way I’m cutting this yard twice in this kind of heat.

This story was originally published August 13, 2018 at 11:28 AM.