The Wrongs of Spring

March 1998

The Wrongs of Spring
By Bob Coskrey


That magical season is nearly upon us again, when the drab dreariness of winter suddenly dissolves to carpets and canopies of vibrant green. Big damn deal!

All this means to me is seven straight months of cutting grass and trimming hedges, 700 man hours of indispensible time deducted from my rapidly decreasing longevity.

I can painfully recall the time about 20 years ago when I actually enjoyed doing yard work, witlessly spending meaningless days plodding golem-like back and forth across my lawn, yanking up truckloads of weeks, lugging sprinklers, and soaking a gasping earth with megagallons of carcinogenic insecticides, destroying every last molecule to unknown depths, perhaps even exacerbating our already shakey relationship with China, not to mention the possible snuffing out of innocent birds, pets, and even the occasional trespassing neighborhood kid.

On some days, I would complete my daily four to six mile run, then launch myself, exhausted, though enthusiastic, into my mowing, trimming, yanking, spraying routine. I always thought of this as my Middle Class Marathon, and my inevitable attainable gold medal would be an exquisitely manicured yard.

I continued this obsessive compulsive pattern until one day during a conversation with a similarly afflicted neighbor, when he said to me with retrospectively inappropriate passion, “I love it, when after I cut the grass, I can sit on the porch here and see the parallel cutting paths running up and down the length of my yard.” This somewhat excessively reverential statement frightened me, but not nearly as much as my too eager response, “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

The man was a Mower-Ron, a Yard Yahoo, a Weed Weirdo, a Centi-pederast, a Mulch Monkey, a Herbicidal Maniac, who was as whacky as his Weedwahacker.

And I was becoming him. It was at that point that I seriously reassessed my life and my over-involvement in the pursuit of “God’s Little Acre” (actually half of one).

I was 50 years old, with my life freight-training past me like a rewinding video tape. I shouldn’t be devoting 10 percent of my life, much less 25 percent, to pointless yard drudgery. In these, my golden—not verdant—years, I should be spending my leisure hours reading, writing, traveling, and spending time with my lovely wife, who, incidentally, is well adjusted enough never to have done any more than a total of eight hours of yard work in her entire life.

Did this epiphany suddenly result in the cessation of my lawn labor frenzies? Of course not. One does not stop deeply ingrained behavior like this overnight. At the present, I do just the absolute minimum that will deter my property value conscious neighbors from riding me out of the subdivision on a hedge trimmer.

The key is that I no longer get a kick out of doing it. In fact, I despise and resent its chlorophyllous intrusion into the precious last third of my existence, and if you ever see me standing on my porch after I’ve spend a 90 degree F / 90 percent humidity day toiling in the turf, I won’t be waxing orgasmic over the splendiferous results, but rather praying for a thunderous herd of rampaging mole crickets to decimate my property down to the last dandelion and finally free from this recurring seven months of Hell on Earth.

So again, do I rejoice at the arrival of spring? No, on the contrary, I curse it as a photosynthetic precursor of personal misery and wasted time.

Actually, when I think about it, the only truly joyous springs for me were followed by the word “break” in the days when the only sap flowing was of the glandular kind and the popping “Buds” drowned out the blooming ones.

But that’s another article.