The Lawn People Invade the Country

They need to stay in the suburbs

Suzanne V. Tanner wrote a very funny story about the Lawn People. She reminded me of our Lawn People, and my story is not funny at all. Sorry, not sorry.

We moved out to the country 28 years ago. At that time our two-mile-long road was a dusty dirt thing with eight houses on it.

It was perfect. We had 22 acres with only about two acres mowed. We used a John Deere riding mower to cut the grass. It was more of a field of weeds than it was a grass lawn, and that was fine with us.

In the autumn the leaves fell and we left them where they fell. Then in the spring the weeds grew up through the fallen leaves and we’d mow them every couple weeks. Very low maintenance.

Time passed, and the township paved the road. That was nice because passing cars didn’t send up clouds of dust that wafted into the house.

Nearby landowners subdivided some of the large parcels of land. One huge parcel was divided into eight smaller parcels; the largest was ten acres and the smallest was seven acres.

Pretty soon people bought these new parcels and built fancy houses on them.

They hired landscapers to plant hedges, trees, shrubs, flower beds, and pristine lawns.

They installed gazebos.

Each house features fancy light fixtures that come on at dusk and stay on till dawn.

Then they installed spotlights that shone up into the tree branches.

The next spring the landscapers were back spraying bug and weed killer onto the lawns.

Eventually there were 19 houses on our little road.

One summer a few years back Dear Husband (DH) was working so much that the lawn hardly got mowed. I don’t mow because I can’t bear to see the toads and other critters running to get out of the way of the mower. DH gets off the mower and moves them out of the way, bless his heart, but I know there are plenty of critters that get mowed over anyway and I can’t do it.

So the weeds were high that summer when a couple of women pulled down the driveway and rang the doorbell. They seemed surprised when I answered the door. A little embarrassed, even. They said, “Oh, we just wondered if anybody still lived here.” “Because of the high weeds,” they said.

I told them I preferred to think of them as my wildflowers. They slunk off.

So the Lawn People have invaded the country.

And they can go fuck themselves.

We were here first. We were here when all the people on our road were country people.

I’m sure when the Lawn People moved out here they thought it was a lovely rural area.

But then they hired the landscapers to spray chemicals all over their lawns. They kill the bugs and bees, and with them the birds. They confuse migrating birds with their spotlit trees. What the hell is wrong with the Lawn People?

We are all on well water. Don’t they understand that they are all saturating the water table with their damned lawn chemicals? Don’t they care that they are destroying the very land they live on?

So here’s a tip, Lawn People.

If you want to live in the country, leave your fancy doodads in the suburbs and enjoy the beautiful countryside.

But if you want to live in a suburban landscape, stay in the damned suburbs.

And if you have land in the country that you’d like to sell off, ask your neighboring landowners if they’d like to buy your land.

I wish we’d had that chance to avoid the Lawn People.