Love and the Art of Lawn Care

I despise mowing the lawn. In fact, take all aspects of yard maintenance, from picking up sticks to shoveling snow, and you can hack it all to pieces with a giant weed whacker for all I care. Chase with a leaf blower each last remain all the way to kingdom come. But where does this antipathy come from? A dorm room and apartment dweller, I’ve engaged in relatively little lawn care. T., of course, is an avid gardener, and only trusts me with spade and hoe as much as he trusts me to remember to take the bread out of the bread maker after it beeps. This even though I’ve spent whole Saturday mornings pulling up by hand each pokey green piece he’s identified for me as weed, and mispronouncing humus like hummus at the Rural King. This even though, to support him, I’ve changed my Facebook interests to include gardening, like putting the cart before the horse, faith before the leap.

Growing up, I lived in a house with a woman who loved yard work so much that she only relinquished it upon occasion, and then only if she could have more fun concocting ruses of the Tom Sawyer variety. Neighborhood kids would come from blocks away to pick our fallen crab apples and throw them into the buckets my mother had simply set out and magic-marker labeled “5 points” and, further away, “10 points.” She’d also sacrifice her fun for my edification, handing over the task of riding dizzying, increasingly smaller co-centric circles around the family backyard in the name of my “practicing my shifting skills.” Why couldn’t we have wood chips? Concrete? What could the neighbors really do to us if we didn’t keep neat and trim our own little patch of Earth, maintain its chemical-green? I hadn’t yet read any David Foster Wallace, but on my own I could have made a case for the alignment of Midwestern lawn care and fascism.

When after college I left for New Mexico, it was the steadily thinning and browning grass along the way that buoyed me. I’d invited my mother along to divide the drive (yes, in my now well-mastered stick shift car). In fact I asked her to make the hardest part of the drive, which I knew, but didn’t tell her I knew, would be pulling out of the driveway. Fifteen hundred miles later, it was August in Oklahoma and all that dying foliage had completed its metamorphosis, had become ditch weed, scrub, scraggle. At the moment we crossed the state line—desert sunset brewing—the thinnest, palest rainbow hung splayed as exactly as a movie marquee over the sign Welcome to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, but I couldn’t be bothered to gape, so taken was I with my new lunar landscape, its unapologetic fruitlessness.

Surely this signaled a new possibility for world order. Certainly it heralded a new view that would be afforded to me, new resident in such a landscape. Later I learned that all those miles of empty middle were seen as great for missile testing.

And a decade later, a few states and a few moves later, I live with a man and a cat and a yard, smack-dab in that Midwestern country that so inspired (if sometimes through horror, sometimes amusement) the great DFW, a man with sentence patterns like the death scenes in Westerns, all that choking and clutching and then the last surprising stagger before the finish. I aspire to write sentences that die so gloriously. I also aspire to convince my lover that gardening might really be a hobby of mine too, maybe if, in trade, we do over the lawn in gravel.

I suspect T. would prefer an even bigger lawn, that in his native Illinoisan soul he takes a flat green expanse as signifier of the magnanimity of a man, prairie-conquering homesteader. He tricks me into pushing our mower up and down its rows by marveling about the workout it is, by claiming the ritual of the cold-beer finish, grass stuck with sweat to his arms and legs and even inside his ears as he tips back his head to guzzle. I suspect he’s been talking to my mother.

And so, out of love and desire for cold beer, and maybe because I was also always tricked, every time, by my mother’s apple bucket ruses, the other day I mowed our lawn in Illiana.

And, out of what might have been a mixture of love and spite, I trimmed with the good kitchen scissors the rangy grass that rings our unlandscaped house, where it’s too close in for the mower.

“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” T. had pronounced when I first floated this alternate solution to buying a device called a weed eater, a contraption sure enough to condemn our souls to that same circle as Il Duce’s, as Franco’s.

I had to sneak out the back door when he wasn’t looking. I began at a corner, laying scissor-edge to brick foundation. Were the neighbors watching? I felled green fronds like tall hay in a field, or like relatively tall hay in a relatively miniature field, and then I went around the lamppost. I was working along the front of the house when I felt the first stinging blisters, a sudden pain like what as kids we’d called a Snake Bike, and what T. and his naughty Illinois neighborhood kids had called an Indian Burn. I choked up with my grip. I attempted to switch hands. The scissors were harder and harder to work. I kept going. Was I a fascist now? Was I having fun? Was this love?

I finished. Ruined hand, ruined scissors, panting in the grass.

“So that worked?” T. said, calmly from the steps.