There’s a house I pass on my way back and forth to work where the grass hasn’t beenmowed during the entire administration of George W. (Shrub) Bush.
|
The grass at this place might not have been mowed for longer than that, but I can’t say for certain, since I’ve only been driving by every day for a little over a decade. I know people live in the house, but the yard is as wild as Borneo, and the grass is so tall you can imagine wild buffalo walking through it, like on the prairie.
I should admit going into this that I’m the kind of guy who starts getting nervous if I skip a week of mowing my yard. As a matter of fact, I’m obsessive about it, because of the way I was raised.
In summer, my brothers and I had to mow the grass at our family home every Saturday morning, because it was my father’s belief that an unkempt yard is the sign of an unkempt and untrustworthy homeowner, and also, those people with untidy lawns bring down the property values of everyone in the neighborhood.
I always groused about having to mow the grass when I was a kid who’d rather be fishing on a summer Saturday. But when I bought my own first house, there I was the first Saturdaymorning of summer,mowing the grass with a borrowed lawnmower and proud as punch to be doing it. Go figure.
I know it’s dangerous to make assumptions about other people, but I’ve always kind of assumed there was something a little lazy, and a little shady, about the people who live in that house on my commute. There was a similar house near mine in East Brunswick, where the grass was chest high and the gutters on the roof never got cleaned. Over the years, the gutters accumulated so much leaf gunk that they had little trees growing out of them.
We saw the residents of that home from time to time. The man drove a fancy car and wore a lot of gold jewelry. The lady had incredibly big hair and wore skirts and heels.
I wasn’t the only neighbor who noticed their personal appearance was in stark contrast to the appearance of their yard. In fact, neighborhood rumor said those people were mobsters in the witness protection program, so apparently I wasn’t the only one making assumptions based on the height of their grass and the condition of their rain gutters.
I don’t want anyone to make that kind of assumption about me, so I mow religiously, except in the backyard, where (despite a million dollars’ worth of grass seed and fertilizer) the soil’s so bad and it’s so shady only moss will grow.
I got a letter to the editor this week that might force me to change my lifelong perceptions about mowing the grass every week, however, and it might make me look at those people with jungles in their yards in a different light.
The letter was from a lady from Wall Township named Adriana Calin, who was recently ticketed for having overgrown grass on her property. It was her contention that she isn’t being lazy by letting her yard run wild, she’s doing it on purpose as her part of the battle to combat environmental pollution and global warming. Those problems, she wrote, are caused in large part by people like me, planet killers suffering from "perfect lawn obsession."
In her letter, she points out thatAmericans use about 800 million gallons of gas a yearmowing their yards. She claims that a traditional gas mower produces as much pollution as "43 new cars each being driven 12,000 miles."
She claims landscape irrigation uses more than 7 billion gallons of water per day across the country. In this area, she says, 30 percent of the water we use goes to lawn care. The runoff, full of fertilizer and chemicals, kills fish and the insects they feed on. She claims landscape refuse, like trimmings, "contribute approximately 32million tons to the municipal waste system, representing more than 13 percent of total municipal waste in the United States."
Reading her letter, I got an understanding of howMoses felt when he read the Ten Commandments. It was a bona fide EUREKA! moment, and I’m pretty sure it will change my life.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a little guilty for driving a pickup and dithering about whether to sell it and buy something more fuel efficient, something that would reduce my carbon footprint. Now I realize I don’t really have to sell my pickup after all. If I really want to do something truly meaningful, I just have to quit mowing and let the grass grow up to my navel.
My wife recently pointed out a story in The New York Times about a guy who raisesmoss and sells it to people who want what he calls "the moss approach to yard maintenance," so I know just where to start (www.mossacres.com)- at least where the backyard is concerned. Grass grows fine in the front yard, so that will be a different story. In a couple of weeks, the front yard will look like a photo on the cover of National Geographic, sans lions and elephants, of course.
I just want to letmy neighbors, my wife and my township officials know what I’m planning in advance. I wouldn’t want my wife to think I’ve become even lazier, my neighbors to think I’ve entered witness protection and my township to think I deserve a ticket.
Instead, I’ll be deserving of a medal, and it can be delivered to my home. I urge whoever brings it to come equipped with a machete to hack through the undergrowth on the way to the front porch. • • • I am really amazed at stories I read in the daily newspapers concerning outgoing Superintendent of Schools Barbara A. Trzeszkowski of Keansburg, who will retire June 30 after 40 years in the district, and will get a severance package of $740,926. Under the contract she negotiated with the board that was signed in 2003, $556,290 of that is severance, $170,137 is for unused sick days and $14,449 is for unused vacation days.
Why should you care about how much severance a school superintendent in Keansburg gets? Well, because Keansburg is one of the state’s Abbott districts. Those districts get a lot of money from the state because they’re allegedly too poor to pay for education on their own. Because of that, the courts said we all have to chip in. Keansburg gets 81 percent of its school budget from the state, our tax dollars.
Which means that no matter where you live in New Jersey, some of your tax dollars will be going into Barbara A. Trzeszkowski’s severance package.
Is this a messed-up state, or what?
Gregory Bean is the executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].