Army of Yard Workers Turns Green

One male spouse battles the garden 

By Thomas Litchford 

Did you hear that? It sounded like a bunch of very sick cats. That was the collective groan of millions of men and women — the ranks of an army of yard workers — contemplating the prospect of mowing the lawn this afternoon. And every time the enemy is cut down, it grows back.

The first time I participated in this war on plant life, I was about 10 years old. I saw my dad using the weed trimmer to cut grass along the neighbor’s fence. Perversely, I thought it looked like tremendous fun. I asked if I could try it. Dad didn’t miss a beat: he told me he’d pay me $2 a week to trim the yard.

Without even meaning to, I’d started my first business: Soon I was mowing my own yard and a neighbor’s. Within a few years, I had six lawns to mow every week. It was good money for a teenager with a comic book habit.

Naturally, I hated every minute of it. 

In Suburbia
And now I find myself gassing up the mower again, after almost 10 years of living in rented houses that had lawn services, or had no lawn at all. Our first place was in Navy housing, and we had a tiny little plot of grass that a neighbor mowed. Then we rented a duplex whose sad little yard was taken care of, however poorly, by two guys who showed up in a little pickup every two or three weeks. In our last house, there was a gigantic deck where a yard would have been.

But our latest PCS brought us back to the suburbs, and for the first time in my adult life, I’m doing yard work. Raking, mowing, watering, fertilizing, and weeding — which I’ve hated ever since my sisters and I were given the itch-inducing task of plucking stray shoots of grass out of the juniper.

Photosynthesis Wars
So I have dirt under my fingernails, but I also have tomatoes and herbs and peppers growing in pots on the deck, and I’ve decided that “yard work” sounds...well, too much like work. I’m proposing a new way of looking at our lawns, our shrubs, our lives.

From now on, the words “yard” and “work” should never appear side-by-side in an English sentence. Instead, we will use the word “gardening.”

Try it out. If you say, “Tom, I’d love to come over and watch the game, but I have a bunch of yard work to do,” I envision you sunburned, mosquito-bitten and sweat-filmed. You have little flecks of cut grass sticking to your forehead.

On the other hand, you could say, “I’m going to do some gardening this weekend.” To me, that sounds like you’ve planned a few reflective hours of pruning, harvesting, watering and perhaps pulling a few sneaky weeds.

As with any task, it’s a matter of perspective. We can see the green that surrounds us as either an undying, zombie-like enemy, or we can see it as a glimmer of life amidst the concrete, sheetrock and steel we encase ourselves in for most of the day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some gardening to do.