Yard Work

WARNING: this column contains material that may not be suitable for husbands and children (or whoever should be helping with the yard work). Parental (or wifely) discretion is advised. It could ruin a perfectly good yard-worker. Nevertheless, in spite of risking the wrath of readers, I must be true to the writer’s noble tradition of penning an opposing point of view when reason cries out against cultural practices that oppress certain segments of society or minority populations (a minority of me, anyway).

Our culture has dug itself into a black hole that vaporizes enormous amounts of time, energy, and money. I speak of yard work. I do not mind yard work. In fact, I have often thought that pulling weeds provides one of the clearest distinctions between childhood and adulthood: weeding is one of the easiest of an adult’s duties, but among the most grievous of a child’s day. For adults, yard work can be a release from tensions and a rest from the nerve-wracking endeavors that we encumber our lives with … or it can be another endeavor to encumber our lives with. It is not hard; in fact, I like exercise and hard work in the outdoors (like hauling hay). Fiercely leveling a weed patch with a shovel can be a good workout; but most forms of yard work, such as having to be careful of flowers when weeding between them, are tedious and time-consuming. And the mandatory regularity of it all takes such a chunk out of life (it seems to me). For other people, the slow-paced rearranging of dirt is relaxing and even therapeutic. I can understand that—have felt that way on occasion. Nonetheless, many thoughts and questions have puzzled me over the years, not to mention the pressure brought to bear by a neighborhood full of nice yards. The subtle underlying expectation toward conformity is a menacing cultural innovation (it seems to me).

Do not misunderstand: I am not criticizing those who enjoy yard work. To the contrary, I hold them in the highest esteem. In fact, I revere them as nearly superhuman. Some people create masterpieces of their purchased plots on earth, and their houses sit in the midst of landscaped works of art. It is wonderful that some are inclined to create an oasis of beauty, bursting with the lush and lovely. Their talent and interest should be applauded as much as a concert violinist’s talents. However, just because a few concert violinists walk the earth, should the rest of us feel obligated to humiliate ourselves in ludicrous attempts to keep up with them? If violinists play Saint-Saëns violin concertos with a musical eloquence that nearly transcends mortal experience, or if gardeners produce flowerbeds of similar affect on beholders, should the rest of us squeak the strings or blight the blossoms, and afflict the masses with our meager imitations of the masters? Heavens, No! The concert violinist needs an audience. If everyone could play like that, no one would pay attention to anyone else; all could listen to themselves practice. A concert violinist's extraordinary talent is rare, and thus highly valued.

Why can’t green-thumbed people be like that—a little more rare instead of everybody trying to be one? And why can’t their yards be viewed as unique wonders of the world, instead of every homeowner from the Atlantic to the Pacific trying to keep up with whoever started it all? An unrelenting series of 500 nice yards in a row only guarantees that none of them will be viewed as special. Variety and contrast are key to aesthetic appeal. Rainy days make clear days more wonderful, and too many clear days are droughts and make rainy days welcome. We need an alternation of both exercise and rest: an unceasing continuation of either without the other would kill us. So if the essence of beauty is variety and contrast, why not let my yard (and those of the similarly disinclined) be the contrast that makes the other yards stand out as really beautiful? Somebody should have to do it (it seems to me).

Probably a small percentage of the general populace truly enjoys the toils of tilling and tending to dirt. The majority exert themselves against the incessant forces of nature in order to hone out a decent-looking lot simply because everyone else is doing it (which means that it is cultural). They fight this endless battle simply to avoid the embarrassment of having the only "disgraceful yard" in town. Seeing the nationwide acceptance of this cyclical futility without anyone questioning the meager returns for so much work, I often ask myself: Where did it all start? Whose idea was this cultural madness that everyone should have an immaculate yard? Or that every blade of grass should be cut to a uniform length of two inches, that bushes should have regular haircuts, and that colorful wild flowers, like dandelions, do not count because they need no care, but only the kinds of flowers that we must buy at the store and that need hours of TLC to survive are permissible? Thus, the original plants that were in the yard must be taken out, so that purchased plants that were originally out can be put in. Then some of us husbands try to weed the resulting mixture and seldom get it all right, unable to distinguish the good, bad, and the ugly. Consider dandelions, for example. I happen to like dandelions. They are beautiful yellow flowers with greens as nutritious as spinach and other vegetables sold in the store. How did they become culturally defined as undesirable? I have eaten clover, pigweed, dandelion greens, lettuce, and broccoli; and if what tastes worst is best for us, I'm sure they're all very nutritious. So my weed patch may have about as many vegetables as my garden. If not, my garden certainly has as many weeds as my weed patch; so what do I weed out of which? Emerson said a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. That explains my hesitancy. I’d rather be cautious until all the discoveries are in. One careless Saturday of overzealous hoeing could wipe out a fortune.

Of course, gardens, fields, and food producing lands have been tended and weeded throughout history, but no people in history had lawns cut to a uniform height and manicured about the edges with clean straight lines separating them from weedless dirt—not until now. The homesteaders of the West and the Native Americans among whom they insteaded both let the land lay about their homes, tepees, hogans, or cabins as is (or was). Whatever wild grass carpeted the prairies did so up to the walls of their abodes or to areas trodden bare by domestic traffic with stone walk ways for muddy seasons, but they did not spend their time bothering with nicely manicured lawns or sections of prairie. The idea never occurred to them, and if it had occurred to any precocious seer of those past cultures, the stares of disbelief from his peers as to what he might even be talking about would have been as strange as the stares I get when I ask: why do we have lawns?

Though a few breathtaking yard extravaganzas dot each municipality, most of us slave merely to make our yards "presentable"—not in hope for joy in the beholders or that they will even notice if the yard is nice, but because we know they will notice it if it is NOT nice. Did yesteryear's Amerindian villages, picturesquely positioned on the prairies or in the woods, look bad? No, they were beautiful scenes. Yet can you imagine a chief's reaction if someone from our day could have asked him why they had no manicured lawns or trimmed hedges? The Natives already think we are crazy—no sense in proving it beyond dispute with a few more stupid questions. They did not have time to fiddle with such nonsense, but we evidently do, judging by the national habit.

Both technology and a "keep-up-with-the-Joneses" mentality contribute to this insane eradication of plants (weeds), resources, time, and money. The invention of the lawn mower did not help any. How would ancient Native Americans or medieval serfs have kept a lawn uniformly two-inches high without a mower? Such an effort by hand would have been a ridiculous waste of time and energy. So why is it not still a ridiculous waste of time? Merely because we can now do it some other way than by hand? It may be that a newly mowed lawn looks nice to us only because we have been culturally conditioned to think so. If an 18th-century chief had seen a square section of prairie mowed to two inches, he might have thought it quite funny looking—like a woman's long beautiful hair sheared to a crew cut.

Most of us work five days a week; and if we strive for some semblance of sabbath-keeping, that leaves one free day in a week to have fun—Saturday. Yet what do people spend their Saturdays doing? Yard work! How did a whole nation of intelligent people allow themselves to be caught up in a custom of selling their lone free day of each week for a fancy yard?

Beautiful yards are wonderful for those keen on devoting their time to them, but it is unfair that those yards have so much power to make all the rest of us feel guilty or to subject us to the pernicious pressure to whip out the tools and let the metal fly in its fury to beat the Saturday sunset ... and for what? So that we can feel a sense of accomplishment at having shot our one free day of the week?

Having five weekdays tied to a job and most summer weekends tied to yard work leaves precious little time to enjoy the mountains. Nevertheless, we occasionally get away from our weeds for a weekend in order to enjoy nature's wide-open spaces. We arrive at the camping spot in the mountains, take a deep breath of fresh air, scan the majestic mountains as far as the eye can see, and exlaim, "Isn't this beautiful!" And what are we looking at? Millions of acres of weeds! We fill most Saturdays trying to keep a puny plot of earth free of weeds, so that we rarely reach the summit of a mountain to overlook huge landscapes full of them; but when we do, we marvel at the majesty of how beautiful they are! In the mountains the weeds are beautiful, but in our yards they are not, but are culturally determined to be unsightly and not allowed. I do not understand.

Nevertheless, I sympathize with my poor wife, who must bear with this unique view of vegetation, though I am not entirely alone in this perspective. The front yard of our rental once launched some weeds to an impressive height. Quite embarrassed at how fast the summer sun gave rise to this unruly crop's power to shame us unawares, my wife armed us with weapons of war on weeds—a shovel or hoe to every man (me), woman (her), and child of ours. We marched to the battlefield and had scarcely begun to get the upper hand on this field of foes, when the renters came out and expressed their sorrow at our intent to fell the weeds, which they thought were beautiful, natural, and wished that they might remain in place. With help from the shovel I was leaning on, I remained standing instead of rolling on the ground with laughter, while witnessing in my wife's countenance a degree of bewilderment as rare as a hair on a bald man's head. She had told me for years that I was probably the only one in the world with such a weird opinion, and here we found a whole house full of them. She paled in speechless astonishment that others could harbor similar sentiments as the children and I helped her home, where she eventually recovered, though the weeds won the war that day.

Comparisons with others' yards can be as unfair as sibling comparisons. "Why can't you be like your brother Johnny?" and "Why can't we have a yard like the Joneses?" both carry the same intonation pattern. People should be accepted for who they are—green thumb or not. The risk of psychological trauma that may result from sibling comparisons—or yard comparisons—is simply not worth it. No one should be judged by the color of his thumb! Or by his lawn! In fact, some of my best friends have lawns. Come to think of it, everyone in town has a lawn. I guess I do too, for that matter. Nevertheless, you cannot judge a book by its cover, and neither I nor Mother Earth should be judged by her cover either. Let her wear her hair how she likes! Who am I to rearrange it and then assume I have improved it?

Yes, I did grow up in the 60's, but I was not rebellious then. I dutifully spent every Saturday morning trying to start the lawn mower, etcetera. Not until 30 more years of etcetera have I begun to wonder about us—about our culture of living life by the yard. We grow by the inch, die by the year, and live by the yard throughout. Both slopes of time—the climb to and the descent from a brief prime of life—are filled with the lawn of life. Yet for what more noble cause can we give our lives than to have uniformly trimmed lawns, sculpted bushes, and weedless dirt between the thorns ... I mean bushes.

Okay, maybe I am getting carried away. I can see the other point of view too, which moves me to great compassion for my wife and neighbors, none of whom like weeds, or so I surmise from the unanimity of opinions heard thus far. For them, I regularly sacrifice my view for the good of the neighborhood. (It's better my view be sacrificed than me.) So to keep their peace of mind and to keep my pieces in mind, I try for a tolerable appearance.

What can I say except what I usually say after trying to explain my perspective to either wife or neighbor: "Never mind. Sorry I brought it up. Yes, I have a shovel. No, I can do it." Furthermore, if it makes my wife happy, maybe it's worth it for that alone, in spite of the fact that (to me) it seems a bit overly optimistic of folks to expect us to make earth look better than the Creator made it look. But we can try! In fact, cultural norms say that we must try ... or have little choice but to try ... no matter how hopeless ... no matter how far (away in time this elusive perfect yard may be) ... an impossible dream, to be sure. There I go again ... being realistic. (knock, knock)

Excuse me; I must answer the door.
Oh, it's the neighborhood beautification committee!
What? You all read my essay on yard work?
Oh no, it won't be necessary to string me up by my non-green thumbs.
Please! Try to calm down!
It was merely a point of view ... only one way of looking at things.
I simply wanted to express that opinion ... and get it off my chest.
There ... I feel better now.