Rambling Rhodes

Lions Are Just Dandy

Spring has once again arrived here in Minnesota. I know this because my lawn has once again become absolutely alive with dandelions. I’ve written about this before, but since I have no idea what else to write about, I’m going to write about dandelions, whether you like it or not.

To put it mildly, I’m not all that big into lawn care. I don’t care about my lawn. All my neighbors seem to spend all sorts of time caring about their lawns, but I, quite frankly, fail to see the point.

I’m constantly being bombarded by advertisement mailings telling me about the horrors of crabgrass, but my thinking is “hey, at least it’s grass.” In this respect I’m very much different from my father, a man who considers lawn care an art form bordering on religion, bordering on psychosis. If there’s one enemy my father engages in ongoing battle against, it’s crabgrass.

I can’t recount the number of times I’ve stood in my parent’s yard, talking with my mom and dad, only to have my dad eventually, inevitably, slowly fall to knees—as if pulled by a gravitational force only he feels—and start pawing around the lawn, tweezering rogue crabgrass with his thumb and forefinger. The act always struck me as sort of mysterious, as if he was channeling his former life as a truffle-snuffling pig.

I suffer from no such past-life flashbacks. In my yard, crabgrass grows unchecked, outgrown only by dandelions, which haven’t taken root in my dad’s lawn since somewhere back in ’79, which dad refers to only as “that incident.”

To underscore just how bad my lawn apparently is, my girlfriend recently had a conversation with a woman who lives up the street from us. The woman asked which house we lived in and, upon realizing the house in which we reside, the woman, quite unabashedly, stated “oh, I know that house; that used to be the nicest lawn on the street, now it’s the worst.” We won’t be having her over for dinner any time soon, unless we’re serving dandelion soup.

Taken by itself, that conversation might have persuaded me to take a more proactive approach with my lawn. I might have even finally called the number on all those TruGreen ChemLawn fliers that fill up my mailbox. I may have actually taken the first step down the path of becoming a crabgrass snuffler, like my father before me.

Thankfully, I was saved from that horrible fate by another neighborly encounter, this time with a woman pushing a carrier packed with three young children. Again, it was my girlfriend who actually had the encounter, as I was probably inside the house at the time doing something productive, like taking a nap.

Anyway, according to my girlfriend, the three children were a gleefully energetic bunch, clearly pleased to be out and about in the spring air. One of the children, with an adoring lilt in his voice, remarked “look at all the dandelions! They’re so pretty!”

And so they are.

When you really think about it, when was the last time you heard a child remark about how pretty grass is? Or how horrible crabgrass looks? But, they understand dandelions. They appreciate dandelions.

What all this comes down to is that I still don’t care all that much about my lawn, but if I have to really think about who I want to impress more: my neighbors, or their children, I tend to think I’d want to impress those who appreciate the dandelions.

If for no other reason, at least that would allow me to continue to be lazy.

Posted by Ryan at May 1, 2007 11:43 AM | TrackBack