Meadow

Last year we invested a great deal of effort and quite a bit of money, attempting to correct our back yard lawn’s obvious deficiencies. It’s not a big back yard — we live in a housing tract comprised predominantly of three-plexes, with narrow back yards abutting each other on all sides. (It’s like a cube-farm for yards.) We don’t spend a whole lot of time in it (except eating on the adorable mini-deck during the summer months — it fits a tiny cafe table with umbrella, two chairs, and a grill precisely). Mostly, the lawn is that thing my husband is forced to mow (I can’t lift the ancient clunker mower to get it out of the garage, over the rocks, and to the lawn). The lawn is lumpy, with bald spots and moss and a swampy spot at the back, and it spawns weeds like blowfly maggots in carrion (which we refuse to spray for because the only creatures deriving any pleasure from it are our chemically-sensitive cats). And the cats mostly traverse it to the bushes at the back, where they spend hours ambushing each other and staring through the slatted fence into other yards (at what, I haven’t the slightest inkling).

So when the snow finally melted this spring, I thought I’d get the jump on the stupid lawn. I raked and fertilized, removed obvious weed holdouts from the year before, and re-seeded.

It was a wet spring. I’m convinced the grass seed drowned.

When the grass came in as patchy and tufty and wan as it’s ever been, despite aerating and fertilizing and mowing and weeding and all the rest of it, I couldn’t bring myself to waste any further emotional investment in it. And the combination of my laissez-faire with the nearly continuous rain and the hubby’s work schedule led to the grass getting entirely away from us. When he finally had a day that was dry enough to mow, that he actually wasn’t working, it was too late. We had a meadow.

To be fair to the hubby, he really did try to deal with the meadow, but it killed the weed-whacker, and that was pretty much the death-knell for the idea of lawn.

So instead, we now have a massive playground in which our charming pets play “deadly jungle cat”, springing out of the dense foliage to devour unsuspecting bugs (and incidentally wiping out unprotected ankles whenever I venture forth to water my tomatoes). Apart from the ankles, this is massively entertaining. And who knows — perhaps letting the yard go feral will mean a better-behaved lawn next year, after the snow kills the meadow off? (I’m not holding my breath.)

At least I have an excuse to be lazy.