A Boy and His Lawn

What is it about men and lawns? I mean, seriously, what is it? Roomie is absolutely obsessed with his lawn. The garage is jam packed with fertilizers, weed killers, cutters, trimmers, edgers, hedgers, mowers and blowers and even a damn vacuum. Yep, a vacuum, so he can vacuum up the leaves that are demarking his carpet of green.

This man will go out at 7 pm and in the dark, on his hands and knees trim around the sprinkler heads, so the lawn gets its daily drink. He has this complex set of sprinklers all on timers, all going off in sychronized glory in the wee hours of the morning. Good thing, since we are now officially in a ‘drought’ out here and the water police are always about. Wouldn’t want to get a lawn ticket, now would we? I wonder what the fine is on that? Or is it community service – 200 hours in a desalinization plant?

He can also spot a weed or a nasty ol’ mushroom at fifty paces, regardless of the time of day or night. I think he maybe must do some of this by smell because I sure as hell can’t see it.

Last year, he had a little pile of brown gook on the lawn one day. I thought it was cat barf. We have quite a few free roaming felines in the neighborhood and God knows cats love to barf, especially on other people’s lawns. No biggie, right? Wrong. Roomie became obsessed. He took samples. Took it to all the other lawn nazis in the neighborhood for opinions and analzysations. The ultimate consensus was that it was some rare lawn virus and it took him the longest time to find the right antibiotics to kill the damn thing. I think part of the problem was that most doctors won’t prescribe meds for lawns – but I digress.

So, this year, in fact, quite recently – the devil grass came and wreaked havoc with the lawn. Naturally it was the neighbor’s fault because he had had the nerve to seed his lawn, rather than do the right thing and pop a couple grand for high grade sod. Roomie always looked down on neighbor’s lawn and was constantly offering lawn tutelidge to neighbor. The devil grass was the last straw and roomie went over and had a serious heart to heart with neighbor. In the end, neighbor agreed to order the sod like he should have in the first place and he was replacing Roomie’s lawn where the evil grass had choked the primo sod grass.

This morning at 6 am, Roomie was out there watering the tender new sod grass and speaking to it softly. Coaxing it to take root and not to feel embarassed that it wasn’t as experienced as the rest of the sod lawn that got put down two years ago. I believe he made introductions all around and the new sod grass felt welcomed.

Now, I’m all for a nice lawn. In fact, I’d say that Roomie has the nicest lawn on the block – but the thing that boggles my mind is that this is the same person who doesn’t see two weeks worth of crumbs on the coffee table, cleans his bathroom three times a year whether it needs it or not and wouldn’t know what to do with coffee dribble on the counter, or grease on the stove if his life depended on it.

How can a man be so attuned to a lawn and so clueless about his own home. The place where he eats and sleeps? I swear, the livingroom could be piled to the ceiling with old to go containers, strewn with two weeks of dirty laundry and fur balls the size of basketballs and he’d never notice – but if a leaf falls on his newly mowed lawn, it will wake him from a dead sleep.

So, I ask you, what is it with men and their lawns?

WC