On the banality of lawn care

I was excited a few weeks ago to realize that our lawn needed to be cut. This may sound odd, but last summer and fall everything was so dry that I was afraid that the grass wasn’t going to come back. But it was looking long, lush, luxuriant, and I was happy.

So yesterday, I set my self up for a day of lawn care, I got the mower out. And after a few rounds discovered that it was “luxuriant” the same way the hair of a man with a comb-over is “luxuriant.” Only when I clipped the sparser-than-I-realized grass back, I found not bare scalp but moss. And dandelions.

God, dandelions. Bane of my existence. At least I found a curiously satisfying way to attack them (shovel, at a shallow angle under the center of the dandelion, to cut the taproot, then the whole plant comes up with a gentle tug, without harming the surrounding grass). I’ll need to keep watching for them; the taproots will continue to send up new plants until they exhaust themselves, and there will always be new ones that pop up. But I’ll be ready. After all, vigilance is the eternal price of a lawn.