There's a sweet spot in the night sky early in July, when the sun is fully set, the horizon is blanched of color and the moon is climbing high.
That's the moment, away from city lights, when a man can connect with nature, wander about in the growing darkness and peer through the gloom with the penetrating eyes of a hunter-gatherer ancestor.
This is when I finally decided to drag out the mower after three weeks of rain and a lifelong hostility to yard work.
The only thing I could see was a pain in the grass.
If I don't cut it, someone will complain to the county, putting me on the threatened fine list with the house on the street behind ours, the one where the bottom-feeding mortgage servicer's neglect drives down neighboring property values years after the owner who defaulted on his loan died. Someone cuts the grass regularly—once every summer—but the grazing deer take care of most of the trimming.
Hiding behind the clouds, the moon was of little use to light my way and the night sky offered only humidity and the threat of another deluge. Fortunately, the assortment of weeds that I call the lawn had grown to at least 18 inches, so I could feel where I plowed as I dragged my 50-pound, smoke-belching, ear-pounding mower back and forth across my plot of hell.
One advantage of cutting the grass in the dark is that there's no need to avert my gaze from the new neighbors. No need to talk to the guy whose wife is out there every week with her shiny red Toro. No need to talk to the other couple, who recently invested in dozens of plants to spruce up the landscaping left by the previous owners, who grew too old to care or notice.
Is there anything as pointless as a suburban lawn?
It lies there, always growing but never improving, like a sullen 20-something watching internet porn in the basement, whose ambition never extends beyond where to buy some grass. Only the grass in the yard can’t be disposed of in little plastic bags.
Like the teenager, you can try to ignore your yard but it won’t go away. Leave it alone and it will drive you to tears as the pollen invades your sinuses.
And, of course, the neighbors make matters worse. They cut the grass every week, making your lawn look neglected. They use edgers to create little ditches at the curb. They attach the bag to the mower to suck up all the clippings. And they spray weed killer twice a month to eradicate crabgrass and dandelions.
Their every little obsessive lawn care act serves as a rebuke to your sloth.
Worse, they apply stream-killing fertilizer, which blows on your yard and makes your grass grow thicker and faster.
Some neighbors do all this work by themselves, spurred by some recessive agricultural gene. Other neighbors spend a fortune hiring somebody to do all the work, presiding over a small serfdom governed by a monthly service contract.
In the past (or now on PBS shows), a manicured expanse of turf signified the wealth and decadence of French and British landed gentry. Every estate had a crew of gardeners. Some cut the grass. Some pruned the flowers. Some sculpted the bushes. And an army of peasants gathered the clippings and hauled them away.
Once a week, the aristocrats would actually walk their grounds, croquet mallets in hand. Or they would sit under a cupola, ordering where to move human chess pieces.
But in the land of the meritocratic middle class, there is little significance to gentrified greenery, when everyone shares the American dream of owning a home with a front and back yard.
For me, the height of the grass simply measures my lack of interest. The annoyance the yard causes is measured by the number of dead lawn mowers on my front porch.
But in my underwater corner of Silver Spring, a fresh-cut lawn still carries some value by signaling that the homeowners probably still live there and pay their mortgage.
Even so, I take no pride in my yard. I gain no satisfaction in tending my quarter acre. I win no victory in bending nature to my will.
Cutting the grass reminds me of my childhood, when I would take hours—sometimes days—to finish the job. The fact that we bought my parents' home only underscores the ceaseless Sisyphean nightmare.
The horrible reality is that as soon as I finish mowing the lawn, the grass has grown and it's time to cut it again.
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