When I was younger, there was a brief period of time, a few weeks maybe, when the backyard did not get mowed. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember the glory of it. The grass rose up like a forest, tufted with fingers of seeds in serrated sheaths. Compared to the muddy, fungal waste that my childhood yard would become in proceeding decades, that brief period of stomach-high grass seemed like the beginning of the world.
We would play Pokémon in that grass, imagine all of the varieties that would inhabit my new corner of the wilderness. In the absence of any significant connection to real animals, Pokémon is like a drug to the child mind. It is really a wonder I went into that grass at all. I was generally terrified of insects and dead birds and anything that moved unpredictably. We were actually forbidden from playing in the tall grass. My mother screamed about ticks and other disease-carrying terrors, and my friend’s mother was even worse. Grass stains can kill, apparently.
The grass hurt my father the most. Each green needle stabbed at his pride and caused his skin to ooze beads of translucent shame. The grass was the latest slight in an endless train of frustrations that stretched back to before I was born. He would sigh over the grass and yell at the grass. He would complain about unheard whispers from the neighbors about the decline of our suburban integrity. This grass is destroying us! We are the neighborhood laughingstock!
Maybe the lawn mower was broken? That herbivorous shark of a machine with aerodynamic hull and one-thousand speeds? I really don’t remember.
The issue cleared up eventually. Dad fixed or borrowed a mowing device, and the tall grass was gone in an hour. I’m sure the exercise killed my lungs and forced my eyeballs shut for a week.
Many years later, the third-grade teacher that lived across the street would get a divorce and move away. In her place came an Indian family, a father, mother, and a little son that liked to wander and gape every corner of his new yard. This turn of events gave the neighborhood something to joke about. Little comments about smelling curry every time the doors swung open began to propagate. Sometimes the father didn’t wave or smile hard enough when the Lexuses drove by. An exotic new neighbor gives a suburb excitement to feed upon for months.
Among all the little peeves, this new neighbor had one crucial flaw–the father did not know how to take care of his yard. As his stay grew longer, so did his grass. Before long, his front yard was a matted forest straight out of my primordial past. I’m sure the experienced enriched the toddler’s life immensely, but it was a bane to the established neighborhood. Old griefs were reborn in my father, and he began to complain about the embarrassment just across the street. His imagination swam with the terror of plummeting property values. Is the guy going to hire a crew? My father eventually settled on the theory that the guy was a big city tech-wizard that had come to colonize American suburbia. No lawns in the concrete jungle.
Eventually, my dad took it upon himself to lay the green menace low. He took his monster mower across the street and cleaned up the place in no time at all. I don’t live there anymore, but I imagine the lawns are still as flat and brown as ever. An unpruned landscape is a very dangerous thing.