I still can remember the summer day when a man who lived a few streets over from the house where I used to live was walking by and stopped to tell me that my lawn was the nicest in the whole neighborhood. He then asked me how I kept it looking so lush and green.
The truth was I didn’t do a darned thing to it. I didn’t water it, didn’t feed it and never bothered to yank out any weeds. Yet it looked as if people should be playing golf on it.
Back then, however, I didn’t have any dogs.
Fast forward to 40 years later. Due to a lengthy dry spell and the fact my dogs were single-handedly trying to tunnel their way to the earth’s core, the lawn in back of my current house looked as if had been used for grenade practice. In the center of it was a completely bald, all-dirt area about the size of my living room. And dotting the outer edges were yellow patches of dead grass, also courtesy of my dogs.
Determined to replicate the lush, green lawn from my past, I sent away for some “miracle” grass-seed I saw advertised on social media. The ad showed a guy pouring a bit of water into a cup of grass seeds and turning them into a paste-like consistency. He then spread them on a concrete block. The ad proceeded to show the results after only a few days…a plush, grass-covered block that looked as if had been upholstered in green shag-carpeting.
“Our grass will grow on anything and is virtually indestructible!” the announcer boasted.
I figured if the grass could grow on something as hard and dry as concrete, then my yard (a.k.a. the clay pit) just might stand a chance. So I ordered the seeds, which were not cheap.
They arrived a week later in what looked like a gallon milk-jug. I frowned at it. For what I’d paid for them, I’d expected them to be delivered in a barrel the size of an oil drum.
The instructions said to carefully spread out the seeds in a single layer on the ground and try not to pile any on top of each other, then gently water them, preferably with a light mist, so they wouldn’t move out of position.
I grabbed the container of seeds and dashed outside. That’s when I realized I’d probably need about five more containers to cover all of the bald spots in my yard. So I concentrated only on the king of the bald spots, the big one in the center, and strategically spread the seeds all over it.
The seeds were coated with some kind of powdered green stuff that turned into dust when I touched it. As a result, just about everything I was wearing ended up green. My hands also were coated with it, which slipped my mind when I wiped the sweat off my face.
When I went back inside and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I wasn’t as concerned about looking like a Martian as I was about all of that green powdered whatever-it-was clinging to my skin and being absorbed into my pores. For all I knew, I’d wake up in the morning and have to mow my face.
The next morning, there was a brief downpour, which I thought might be a good thing for my future grass, but all it did was clump the seeds into little islands that floated around in the giant puddle that formed in the center of the yard.
When the clumps of seeds finally sprouted about a week later, they resembled puffy green polka-dots in a sea of clay. And my dogs went outside and promptly squatted on them.
“I should demand a refund!” I complained to one of my friends. “That miracle grass looks more like ‘malnourished’ grass, not at all thick and green like they show in their ads!”
“Maybe it only grows on concrete blocks,” she said, shrugging.
I finally got so fed up with my bald yard and its refusal to grow grass, I did something really impulsive that I still regret to this day. I went to a hardware store and bought bags of grass seed of all kinds: rapid-grow grass, contractor’s grass, Kentucky bluegrass, grass for shady areas, grass for sunny areas, and even heavy-traffic grass. I figured one of them was bound to grow.
When I got home, I opened the bags and mixed all of the seeds together in buckets, and then went outside and wildly flung them all over my yard. There wasn’t even one seed left in any of the bags by the time I was done. And as if on cue, a shower blew in about an hour later and soaked the yard.
To my delight, the grass grew. But my feelings of victory began to wane when the grass continued to grow…into a jungle. Just about everything popped up in my yard, from weeds and crabgrass to fescue and Kentucky bluegrass, which shot up as if it had been injected with steroids.
And now I can’t kill the lawn or stop it from growing. I've created a monster. A week after it’s mowed, it’s already back up to my knees. If a family of wild boars decided to move into my yard, I wouldn’t know the difference.
The worst part is my dogs still continue to dig out there, but the grass grows so quickly, it conceals the holes…until some poor, unsuspecting sap accidentally steps in one. And forget about trying to pick up the dogs’ poop. As soon as they do their duty, that poop disappears into the “Serengeti,” never to be seen again – until some other unsuspecting sap accidentally steps in it.
And nine times out of ten, I’m that unsuspecting sap.
(Does anyone have a scythe I can borrow?).
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