Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Dear retired neighbor with the perfect lawn,


I know that the dandelions and Creeping Charlie in my front yard must be a constant source of frustration to you. Your yard is a lovely green carpet, weed free and perfectly manicured, while mine is a patchy hillside of weeds with a terrible erosion problem.

I am sure that it's worse for you since you are now a groundskeeper at a local golf course. I mean, it's your job to make lawns look healthy and beautiful. And you do a great job.

But I must tell you that I don't really feel all that bad about your pain for one reason:

when my children were small and took naps, on most nice summer days I would leave the window open so my darling baby could sleep in his crib, comfortable and happy, with a fresh gentle breeze wafting in.

And then you would fire up that godforsaken leaf blower. To blow the all-but-invisible leaves off your yard and driveway into the street. I can't tell you how many times I had to close the window and soothe an infant back to sleep because his peaceful slumber was disturbed by the 150-decibel roar of that miserable machine. And I cursed you and your incredibly anal retentive ways, even though I, too, have my issues in that vein.

But today, as I dug up some of the dandelions in my yard (to make you think I was at least making an effort), I was secretly thinking that if this was some kind of karma, I really like it.

Here's hoping for a nice breeze early next week to blow all of my little white seeds over into your yard. And you're welcome.

Signed,
the flower child across the street

5 comments:

  1. Ah... neighbor woes.
    I feel your pain.

    Maybe you could ask him to manage your yard too as a neighborly favor?

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  2. He'll just spray more chemicals on his yard!

    We got an organic lawn company here! They put some molasses and beet juice with corn gluten on our yard. Stunk to high heaven. That might be fun for Mr. Leafblower! :)

    (oh, and whatever the stinky stuff is, it worked.)

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  3. You go, flower child! Believe me, we can relate here .... in fact I once posted something similar about our own neighborhood Lawn Ranger.

    I've never tried to post a link in comments before but I hope it works so you can read about how we got back at him:

    http://lifeofrosie.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

    As Larry the Cable Guy always says, "Forgive me Lord, I know I'm going to Hell for that one!"

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  4. Very nice Julie! :)

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  5. Jennifer, you do what you can. In Heaven we won't have yards anyway, so why waste your time on the crap down here.

    If you didn't look at Julie's Operation Leafe Drop post, you have to. It is classic. I think this is the same neighbor that we had his Christmas deer do naughty things to each other.

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