By Richard Newman
“Time to mow the lettuce!” I tell myself in a futile attempt to jump-start my least favorite domestic chore. I have procrastinated for weeks, and the last month of rain will no doubt earn me a city citation.
My standards are low: As long as my lawn appears relatively short and predominantly green, I am satisfied. I can probably count the actual blades of grass on two hands. The rest of my lawn is composed of some strange leafy green stuff akin to romaine lettuce, thistles, violets, strawberries, ivy, wild mint, wild onions, saplings, lamb’s ear, crab grass (which I look upon favorably because it at least belongs in the grass family) and the occasional strange plant that looks borrowed from a set of the first Star Trek series.
My yard is not a lawn but a war zone. The strawberries battle for turf with the crab grass and the wild mint in the east lawn. The lamb’s ear (anything but a gentle pacifist) is trying to conquer and convert the grass in the west lawn. To the south, the ivy is at war with the only patch of actual grass, the front line of which shifts back and forth, though mostly in favor of the ivy, which is slowly encroaching on the rest of the yard.
The grass is retreating into the brick patio, which looks like the scalps belonging to most of my male colleagues and me—almost enough scraggly hair on top to call it a head of hair, but not something that anyone who had to look at it each day would actually want to keep. Stragglers of grass—deserters, I call them—also keep reappearing in the vegetable garden (anywhere but the actual lawn). Secretly, I am rooting for the ivy, because I probably won’t have to mow ivy much.
I have had a long and sordid past when it comes to lawns. As a sixth grader, I mowed not only our yard, but also half the neighborhood’s yards, and in a year I’d saved up enough money to buy a bicycle, which was stolen outside my father’s office within three months of its purchase. My father was oddly blasé about the experience. His office was in a depressed area of town, and he seemed to think of the theft as some form of community outreach. For him, the loss of my brand-new bike was like charitable giving—which struck me as odd, since my father was at the time a Republican, and from what I could tell, Republicans didn’t ever seem to give anything back.
The week my bike was stolen, it rained and rained. The yards in my neighborhood grew and grew. When the rains stopped and I could finally mow them again, I had to mow slowly, half a track at a time, or the damp clippings would clog the mower. The grass bag filled within minutes. My right palm blistered from gripping the recoil starter pull handle so many times. It took me hours to mow a lawn that had once taken 45 minutes—and yet I still received the same payment of $5 per lawn.
From all this I learned some valuable life lessons—namely that mowing lawns, saving money and hard work were futile endeavors. This mental breakthrough surely paved the way to my eventual career choice of poet.
Other memories of lawns haunt me to this day. There’s the time I drank too much at a Central West End party and passed out on someone’s fancy lawn, for instance. I was sleeping just fine until the automatic lawn sprinklers woke me up around 4 a.m., sopping but sober enough to drive home. As a child, I seemed to be a magnet for dog shit. No matter whose lawn we played in—even on the ones where the owners didn’t own a dog—I would land in shit. If the yard had shit, it would find me, usually while I was diving for a great catch or spectacularly sliding home. The greater the play, the greater the pile of dog shit.
Despite my past issues with lawns, I stupidly got married and bought a house in Webster Groves. The grass grew longer than the marriage lasted. The yard was vast. It seemed that no matter what time I started mowing, I would finish after sunset. I even composed a little haiku while mowing:
Black roofs lick the sun
like an orange sucker. Hurry—
mow, mother#*%@!
I contemplated attaching headlights to the mower so I could mow at night instead of wasting the best parts of the day once or twice a week. If I could have ignored my father’s voice chastising me for being lazy, I would have purchased a riding mower.
I was also neglectful. Every neighbor in the neighborhood used ChemLawn except me. In the spring and early summer, my lawn grew mostly violets and dandelions, a rich carpet of purple starred with gold. It was a gorgeous smattering of color, much more interesting than everybody else’s flat ChemLawn green. Who would mow that? My neighbors on each side tried to organize an intervention, even bequeathing me a very nice “used” mower since my own was old and small and unsuited to such a vast lawn.
“Technically, they are weeds, you know,” said the neighbor to the south.
“What’s wrong with weeds anyway?” I asked. Half the plants we eat started out as weeds. Tomatoes were once thought poisonous, potatoes once thought only suitable for prisoners. Weeds, all weeds!
“You artist types!” said the neighbor to the north.
Dutifully I mowed and mulched the beautiful fabric of violet and gold. What did I expect from neighbors who had yard signs for Federer, a guy who advocated bringing handguns to high school basketball games?
Not long after the marriage failed, I sold the house and moved to Soulard, the old French Quarter of St. Louis where the houses are very narrow and close together and the lawns are almost nonexistent. At least, I thought the lawn was almost nonexistent. It’s a double lot with three small sections to mow, and the only thing that’s nonexistent is the actual grass. There’s plenty to mow, but not enough work to be considered exercise—just enough time to be covered with sweat, grass clippings spat out of my electric mower and the requisite half dozen mosquito bites.
These are the acquisitions of the middle-aged male: a burgeoning midsection, a bald scalp–to–hair ratio in inverse proportion to hair everywhere else (back, ears, neck and nose), a taste for lighter and lighter beer, a habit of watching younger guys on TV accomplishing athletic feats we could never have hoped to do when we were that age, smellier feet, higher mortgage payments, higher insurance premiums and lawns nobody pays us to combat every week.
Every time I mow, I ask myself, “Why lawns anyway?” Lawns are a holdover from the feudal days when only the rich landowners could afford them. They are a holdover from the days when the middle class wanted to imitate the rich, if only in little patches around their houses—yet we have no servants to scythe them or sheep and rabbits to graze them, and therefore, we must mow them.
I am not alone. There is a whole industry of “I fought the lawn and the lawn won” T-shirts, coffee mugs and other cheap crap. There may even be an “I fought the lawn” board game. This is what’s known as a grass-roots movement.
A good friend of mine who lives across from Tower Grove Park solved the problem one day. “I have more than enough grass to look at across the street,” he said, so he paid someone to rip out all the sod in his back yard and replace it with gravel. It looks horrible—hot, dirty and barren, in addition to being ugly. Even his dogs don’t like to go back there to shit.
I’m not sure if he’s won or lost the lawn wars, but at least he no longer has to mow.
