christensen@apollo.uucp (Wendy Christensen) (07/25/85)
I live in an attractive green suburban neighborhood of rabid fescue fanatics. Early last year, as the snow melted and everyone else's lawn started to green up, it became obvious that there was something seriously wrong in my yard. It was, in a word, dead. (Chinch bugs or something, I think.) Well, I had good intentions of doing something about this tragedy, but it was not on my list of top ten priorities for Springtime activities. So, there it sat. Weeds - tall, varied, interesting, and quite irrepressible weeds - took over. I began to like the effect. The wind rustled though them quite nicely, and when the whole thing was about three feet high, I had just about decided to thow a couple of bags of wildflower seeds into the mess and see what happened. Well, sadly, that was not to be. My neighbors shunned me. They turned away, muttering obscenities, when I drove down the street. Their dogs avoided my yard (a distinct plus, I thought). One Saturday morning (universal mowing time), I left early to go shopping. When I returned several hours later, all my beautiful three-foot, rustling, rippling weeds had been shaved down to a most unseemly height of about an inch. The guilty neighbor (proud posessor of one of those riding movers that always appear in absurdly small yards, driven by absurdly overweight men with no shirts) was finishing up the edges with his string trimmer. I got the message. Reluctantly, I hired a landscaping service to redo the yard. They did so, eventually, at great cost and aggravation to me, but that is another story. (Suffice it to say that I managed to hire the most incompetent landscape company in the history of civilization.) My helpful neighbor (the one with the tractor) has recently installed two pink flamingoes (yes, pink flamingoes) in his yard. Next time he goes shopping, I might go over there with my wire cutters and mow down his flamingoes. On second thought, maybe I'll just leave the flamingoes alone and get one of those plaster garden dwarves. (According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, pink flamingoes are the latest in Yuppie chic. Garden supply centers can't keep them in stock.) A small postscript... A few days ago, I heard a brief news story on the radio. It appears that a homeowner, who took offense at a helpful neighbor who mowed his overgrown lawn while he was away from home, has taken said neighbor to court. He is expected to win the case and collect considerable damages. w. christensen