by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/24
I grew up in the 1960s embracing the counterculture, so when I think of manicured lawns of suburbia I think of conformity and the song by the Monkees, “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” That song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin contains the line, “Here in status symbol land.” That has always made me think poorly about lawncare.
Fifty-seven years after that song was popular, I’m now worrying about growing grass on my front lawn. I can’t believe it. How bourgeoisie of me. How anti-environmental. I’m not coveting a golf course lawn, just something that’s not mostly brown dirt, something that’s mostly green.
I live on a street that in one direction the homeowners have been having their lawns replaced with sod and sprinkler systems. Their lawns are uniform and beautifully green. In the other direction, the quality of lawn care falls off. So, depending which way I drive up to my house, I feel average or embarrassed. I guess the guilt of not living up to the suburban social contract is getting to me. My lawn looked awful. It was becoming dirt with vegetative patches, and what green stuff that did grow was mostly weeds.
Susan and I priced going the sod and sprinkler route, but I just won’t pay that kind of money to have a green monoculture in my front yard. However, I have thought about how to put a positive spin on this problem.
I don’t get much exercise. Partly that’s due to being lazy, and partly due to being old and broken. I got to wondering. I thought maybe working in the yard would be good exercise and it would ultimately give me more stamina and strength. I got on YouTube and started researching lawn maintenance. There’s a whole world of lawn nerds out there with plenty of advice.
I bought enough tall fescue seeds to cover the 6,000 square feet of front law and a Scotts Edge Guard Mini seed spreader. I’m not going to worry about the backyard for now, mainly because no one sees it. But it’s a jungle. I also bought a compost/dirt/peat moss spreader (a cheap Landzie knockoff) and covered the seeds with a light layer of garden soil. Then I started watering twice a day.
After a couple of weeks, I was seeing new grass in some places, but not in other places. But I was also having back problems for the first time in months. Normally, I keep my spinal stenosis under control with daily physical therapy exercises and fifteen minutes of 15-degree inversion. But that was no longer enough. I now had to resort to heating pads and pain pills.
I thought about giving up. But I kept pushing myself. I exercised, took my pills, rested on the heating pad, and then went to Home Depot and bought more bags of garden soil, another twenty pounds of Sun & Shade tall fescue seeds, and bags of decorative rocks. Ninety-two pounds in all that trip. I wore my back out, but I put in a second planting of seeds.
I rested up, stabilized my back and went back to watering twice a day. By now, the leaves had started falling, and I was afraid they would kill the new grass by shading it from the sun. I started raking the leaves off the new grass. That really bothered my back. Maybe because I was twisting in new ways.
Which brings me up to now. Yesterday I didn’t do anything and gave my back a rest. I do feel I have more stamina then when I started this project. When I started working in the yard, I could only work just ten minutes, and that wore me out. It was still hot then. I now can put up to a whole hour’s worth of work in before my back makes me go back in, but then it’s cooler. To recover, I need the heating pad and pills again until the next day.
I turn seventy-three next month. I’m wondering just how much I can push my body. I know exercise improves things, but for how long? Since we all die in the end, I have to assume that we can’t always use exercise to extend our health. I watched this video today titled: “Is Exercise a Magic Bullet for Longevity?“
It featured a graph that suggests that most people break down in their seventies. It also showed that in some societies, especially where people work hard all their lives, tend to have more folks active in their later years. But even still, for most people, the seventies are when we break down.
I don’t really care about having a beautiful lawn. I just trying to get something green to grow while testing how much I can push my body. Growing grass is like taking the GRE to see how well I might do in graduate school, but instead it tests how well I might do physically in my seventies.
But as I spend more time working on my front lawn, the more I see that needs to be done. My front yard is on a hill that drops several feet to the street. And it’s eroding. The sewer pipe is becoming exposed in one place, and roots to the big tree in the front yard are showing. I need to get several loads of dirt and sand and start building the yard back up. And the flowerbeds are full of weeds, dying azaleas, crazy holly, and vines that want to grow up the walls of the house.
Instead of fighting the Battle of the Bulge, I’m fight the Battle of the Lawn. I need to arm myself with chainsaws and weed whackers. I just don’t know if I can physically handle all of this. My friend Janis, her father is almost 100, and still works in the yard. Can I physically get into shape so I can do all the yard work I need to do? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll die trying. I can picture myself like Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford clutching my chest while standing in a pile of leaves shouting “This is the big one!” I’m not sure I want to die for lawncare, but I’m not sure I want to die watching YouTube either.
Maybe I’ll get into shape and live to be a 100 and do something else.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
At my house, everything is falling apart, and the lawn is gone. I simply don’t have the money to maintain things to a respectable suburban standard, mainly because I have a non-contributing housemate whose medical and other running costs are higher than mine, and have to come out of my savings.
Anyway, the lawn. When she moved in with me, I gave her carte blanche to do whatever she wanted outside, because she loves gardening (I don’t). The result was that she had the lawn removed, and instead laid out a little path, surrounded by shrubs. The result is a jungle, with weeds and wild grass trying to encroach on every available inch. The front yard is small, and there’s no yard at the back, just a narrow strip of ground around the house. And still, things just grow and grow, and it all takes endless work and generates green bags full of cuttings and garden refuse almost every week. I did some good work this past week, but I’m fed up. This is not the life I want over 70.
I can’t plan my future, because I have too little control over my own finances. My sister was the only person who could possibly have assisted me when the inevitable old age problems arrive, because she’s almost nine years younger, but now she’s moved ten thousand miles away, or whatever the distance to England is, so a few years from now, maybe sooner, I’ll be unable to look after myself, and there’s nowhere to turn.
I’m up the creek without a paddle, and the paddle factory has closed down.
Piet, can you not move to England to be near your sister? My sister, and only sibling lives in another state. One of her sons died, but she still has one, and two grandchildren. It’s too bad we don’t live near each other.
One of the things I regularly worry about is whether me or my wife will be left alone when the other dies. I used to think I would die first because I was older and have had poor health longer, but now I see that Susan does nothing to stay healthy that I worry that I will be last. We never had children, and most of our friends never had children. I see a sharp distinction between the people I know who have children, and those who don’t.
I try to spend as little money as possible because I figure we’ll need it for at home care or assisted living or nursing home care. I’m already getting too weak to do a lot of stuff I used to do. And my house is needing more work all the time. Recently rats and chipmunks have been getting in the crawlspace, and then into the walls and attic.
I hope this house will last as long as the two of us, although I often fantasize about moving into an apartment where I didn’t have to do anything to maintain the place. My spinal stenosis is giving my legs more problems. However, I think it’s economically better for us to try and stay in the house. I figure we’ll move when I can’t take care of it at all.
However, despite all these grim worries I stay rather positive. So many people have it much worse. And I still find pleasure in daily activities. I try hard to maintain friendships. Part of life is just enduring. And getting old is great grist for the mill for being philosophical.
I’ve always strived to have a nice lawn and landscaping, sort of like Hank Hill hating hose marks on the grass. When Momo and I moved into our new home five years ago, it was a house sitting on a hill surrounded by dirt and rocks. We designed and landscaped it ourselves, and then I thought becoming a Master Gardner might be fun. Took the courses over a six week period, like going back to college through Texas A&M. Now I’m older and can’t do half the stuff that needs doing, so that venture didn’t work out to well…but I sure am good at feeding all my wild birds, and pretty sure there is a sign somewhere in our woods put up by the Crows telling the avians where the best food is.
home ownership is a trip i never took; i always figured i’d look into it after i got married. that never happened (none of the ladies asked said yes, for reasons best known to themselves), so i remained a renter. at seventy-three, i sometimes feel like i’ve grown older without growing up. or as my man warren zevon wrote, TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG AND TOO YOUNG TO DIE NOW.