Adieu To My Terrible Lawn, And Its Care 

For the last two years I’ve found myself the caretaker of my landlord’s lawn. This is a privilege I pay incredible money for. The house itself is fine. It’s homey and even beautiful when the light hits it right, and it has a serviceable, flat, unremarkable front yard. 

But its backyard.… Oh, reader. Its backyard is as impassible and pockmarked and inhospitable as a teenager’s face the morning after pizza night. 

Forget a pleasant bourgeois game of badminton on this Martian hellscape. Disregard any notions of a quaint backyard party here; you don’t deserve it. And if you even fucking think about mowing this lawn, be prepared for disaster. 

Every year around this time, my lawn begins to grow, rearing up as cantankerous as an old dementia patient, ready to strike me for the crime of being its nurse. 

Lawn care has become the life-halting speed bump of my summer, a two-hour Shakespearian tragedy I act out each week, slumping and bumping blade against blade with my tiny tiny tiny electric lawnmower: a brilliant piece of technology that barely makes it around the yard without needing its mommy, the battery charger. 

Lawns are, generally for anyone, a huge waste of time and resources.¹ They’re meant to project wealth, status, and manicured perfection: 1950s bullshit that most people lack, in other words. 

Moreover, most of us don’t farm animals, and most of us don’t need to keep grass low to see approaching enemies creeping in the undergrowth towards our castle turrets.

I think.  

“America’s biggest crop is grass,” wrote Business Insider in 2016. And my biggest crop is misery. 

That’s why I’m opting out.

That’s right: I’m getting an apartment. My lawn will be others’ lawn too. I hereby cede my land usage to the common shoe. 

I will no longer have the right to let my dog out unsupervised, nor will I walk outside in my bathrobe, yawning and bumbling like a hungover Tony Soprano, as is my general wont and desire. Indeed, like the mob boss I am not, I have put a hit out on, uh, my American freedom, I guess. 

This week, as I stood on my back porch, my house full of packing boxes, surveying the steadily-growing grass in this spring that keeps arriving, it struck me that at some point, last year, I mowed this piece of shit for the last time. 

I didn’t even clock it. I would have let go of the green control bar without thinking, stared up into the big sky, wiped the sweat from my eyes, and listened as the blades ceased their spin and the cacophony of birds and buzzing insects and Brookside traffic flooded my ears.

It must have been September; it’s March now. I would have been wearing the thin grey long-sleeve that my grandma gave me for Christmas five or six years ago, now faded and full of holes and only useful as a sunblock shirt. 

Time passes so quickly. For these past two years, I struggled against that stupid fucking lawn, hating my life and the sun and grass in general, and now I smile as I remember it. Isn’t that dumb? I’m fondly remembering something that made me so mad I once kicked the exterior wall of my house. 

Well, the house isn’t mine. It’s my landlord’s. Just like the lawn. Maybe the next poor sap will have better luck with it than me.