Grass Pharisees

No, not that kind, the green stuff all over the ground, what you always meant by "grass" before the 1960s. Now, I don't really mind grass, I don't dislike it or anything like that. It 's just that sometimes we move and find out our new neighbors have some kind of fixation on grass. Some people think their yard has to look as good as any golf course, and a few of them seem to measure it regularly to see if it needs to be mowed again.

Now I am not bothered that much by people like that; if they get pleasure out of their yard, that's okay by me. But too many of these "grass freaks" get all religious about it; they want ME to take care of my lawn the way they take care of theirs. And that is where I get bothered.

I guess when you come right down to it, I just don't care that much about having a perfect lawn. It does not excite me that much, certainly not enough to put in all that work to get it. I'll do other things, mainly on the house itself. Give me two-by-fours, drywall, paint, wire, pipe and a bunch of tools, and I'm a happy man. But grass? As long as it is reasonably green, and not too tall, that's good enough for me. (No, I don't water my lawn much; it costs money, and I'd just have to mow it that much sooner. Astroturf? If I had that much money, I've got better things to spend it on, like tools.) So what if there's dandelions? They're kind of pretty in their own way, and it's fun to see the fluff blow away. Raking leaves? Whatever for? better to let them go back to the soil where they are, rather than deplete the soil nutrients by bagging them up and throwing it all away! No, I do not get excited about cutting grass, or fertilizing it, or weeding it, or any of that stuff. I'll cut it eventually; I've never let it get so long that I found a car when I mowed the yard. But I don't do it enough to please those grass Pharisees.

We did make one of them happy this past year. We moved away from him and sold the house to somebody else. I don't know if his new neighbor is a grass Pharisee; I know he isn't a fixer-upper like me, because he bought a very fixed-up house from us. That house was in rough shape when we bought it, and the buyer got a very nice house when we left. That's what my wife and I do with houses: buy them run-down and cheap, and clean them up and make them nicer than we found them. We just don't do any more than we have to with the doggone yard!