Grass

I posted more before I joined Facebook. Then after a while on Facebook I realized I wasn't updating MY status anymore, I was just reading everyone else's. Perhaps I find my life too mundane...maybe the writer in me is struggling because working with computers for so long has made me dead emotionally? Well, I doubt that. So my family has been dealing with a fair amount of drama lately between my mom going in for yet another hip replacement(on the same hip) and my brother's baby girl being born with a heart defect. And between everything that happened I found myself feeling again. Pulling out the pain and anguish and sorrow that fueled so much of my early work. So here I am to blog about none of that. I'm writing about grass.

When we had our house built it came with a "landscaped" front yard. Three bushes, grass and sprinklers. I ripped out their bushes and planted roses because both my wife and I like them. My neighbor's house was built a little bit after mine and when they finally put in this front yard his grass looked beautiful. Then I looked at my grass. We used the same builder, right?? Well, it turns out the the "company" they hired to do the landscaping on my house and several others bought the cheapest(and don't think I'm joking) sod they could, skimped on the sprinklers, pocked the extra and skipped town. So my yard looks like garbage 6 days a week until I mow it and then it looks ok for 1 day. But really this isn't quite the problem either.

I seem to be getting grass everywhere. I dug out an island in our front yard and we planted iris'. There is grass everywhere in there. We have a front flower bed where our beloved roses live that is half lawn. And yet when I look at some of the places where the grass SHOULD be, it's not. The lawn is patchy and inconsistent. So it feels a need to expand?? Can't it just grow where it's supposed to? (I ask the same question of my hair) Sadly, this means I'll be digging the iris' out of the island this summer, expanding it, tilling in something that isn't clay and putting some of that plastic edging stuff to try and keep the grass out. Unfortunately, I can't do that with my roses. They have struggled for so long. We have lost 2 and almost lost a third. I'm slightly beside myself with how to fix that but I bought some plastic edging for that too. Eventually we'll put in some pretty scalloped concrete but this is to stop the grass.

I've decided not to dwell on the grass/gravel that is supposed to be a lawn in my backyard. That takes too many deep breaths to think about.