Yes. Schizophrenic, I say. (No offense to schizophrenics out there -- you’re lovely company, no word of a lie, nor sarcasm, either. Some of my most interesting conversations have been with schizophrenics!)
Anyhow, I call it schizophrenic because after an entire month without mowing our lawn we have patches like this:
(Please ignore my dirty hand.)
And patches like this:
It also means that, to my joy, this has happened:
But there are dandelions, too. Not many, just enough to make you remember that one little dandelion bloom gone to seed will take advantage of my poor stunted grass.
And my hopes that this advantage-taking will be in tiny steps, like a kid slowly inching across the invisible boundary line of a shared chair until there’s only one kid bum and not two in the space, I’m aware that this advantage-taking will be much more like a teenage boy on the third date with an inflated sense of entitlement...
Yes. Those dandelions are going to attack my scruffy lawn. I know this.
So I did this, one evening:
Yep. That’s a 20 kg bucket of dandelions. (And now everyone knows one of the stops on my anti-career that made me so nutty and jaded. And yes: Tim Hortons really does buy 20 kg buckets of chocolate fondant. It’s dripping off your chocolate dips and boston creams, folks, and it sits in a bucket under the donut table until it’s scooped into the fondant warmer. The secret’s out.)
This weeding took less time than anticipated -- about a half an hour balanced on the kids’ hopping ball to keep my knees intact. (My neighbour called it “yoga gardening.” She wasn’t far off, my thighs killed me for two days afterwards! But at least it wasn’t my knees or back.)
And in my travails, imagine how I rejoiced when I found these buggers!
Please excuse the blurry picture, apparently the camera can’t bear to think of the horrors those seedy blooms would ravage against our tender grass, either.
In an effort to propagate our greenery further, I’ve over-seeded the lawn, and have been watering to (hopefully--please, please, pretty please!) keep our grass as grass. Or, in the very least, not looking like dandelions.
Because while I have this:
With all my efforts, I now have this, too:
And really? Really, all I want is this:
What? What’s that sound, you ask? Oh, that’d be the sound of boys whining because I made them stand together for a pretty shot of bare feet in luscious grass. Because boys complain when being asked to do anything except play when it’s summer. But one day they’ll thank me.
One day when we have virgin grass.
