High Tide and Green Grass

As I get older, I notice that there are things that men of a certain age seem obsessed with, among them are the World Wars, sports radio and perfect lawns. The latter is something that I’d never paid much attention to. Grass was something to fall onto, most likely drunkenly, at four in the morning.

On the occasions that I rented somewhere that had a lawn, I was no stranger to receiving mail from the city threatening me and my roommates with ridiculous fines if we didn’t soon do something about the hay field that we’d allowed to come up in front of our shared house. And once, I even had a landlord who mowed the grass for me (something that I realize only now was above and beyond). I suspect that he recognized early on in our relationship that I had never so much as operated a mower.

Now I live with a man who owns his own house and spends more on grass seed each year than I do on car repairs. Some years ago, my partner had a pristine lawn, but for a smattering of weeds throughout it. Thinking that Round-Up would only kill the weeds, he doused his property in a lethal dose. The result, I’m told, was a sun-burnt sort of devastation that brought Arizona to mind.

In the years since, he’s been trying, with varying degrees of success, to recreate that perfect carpet of green. His efforts, to my eyes, are Sisyphean. The weeds and bald patches take up more and more space every year.

“Why bother?” I asked him once, thinking the whole thing a colossal waste of effort. “I mean, we can’t even eat it.”

This was particularly ironic, as he calls most of my meals “lawn clippings.”

“Because,” he explained stormily, “you can’t imagine how ugly a dirt patch of yard is.”

In fact, I really could imagine it. I’d lived somewhere with a rear lawn that was mostly a clay patch with a handful of beer cans scattered throughout like the shittiest of lawn ornaments. I hadn’t minded it all that much. But I kept these thoughts to myself.

Instead, I picked up the Hori Hori knife and began digging up dandelions and thistle with him, knowing that this would leave gopher-like holes that we’d have to fill with grass seed, which would subsequently be eaten by the local magpies.

It’s the neighbours I think, who have the right idea. They have flower beds and a koi pond and the tiniest strip of perfect grass (manageable even if you were using only kitchen scissors to cut the area). While all of these things are interesting, what intrigues me the most is their planting of a weed called Creeping Charlie.

It doesn’t root particularly deeply—making it easy to pull up from our small gardens—and grows fat green leaves that feel nice between the toes. The neighbour has offered to spray our lawn for the pest, but my boyfriend shrugged off this offer, thinking no doubt of his earlier tussle with weed-killer.

Now the Creeping Charlie covers a decent percentage of our lawn and has even begun to spring up from the cracks in our defunct hot tub. It’s persistent.

But then too I think that maybe this is the ticket. Maybe my partner will finally give up on the little patch of grass that he so frustratingly cultivates. Instead we’ll sit out on the deck and watch the Creeping Charlie take everything over while we sit toasting each other with gimlets, listening to the sound of the plants splintering the deck the supports, taking the property over, without even a thought for us.

Missing Something? Edmonton, Alberta 2019.