Working Backward

My mother writes to me that it's snowing outside in Nebraska. That sneaky Midwestern weather.

We're having our spring and a quick weekend into summer, with temperatures in the mid 90s in most of the city.

Here comes spring.

I'm still figuring out what Microsoft Vista has done to not recognize my camera anymore, so you'll have to do with this picture of a Joshua Tree Ryan took during our yearly camping trip to the park.

Everything is in bloom in our garden, the lavenders, California poppies, irises (both Dutch and Siberian), all the rose bushes, the Catalina Island tree poppy, alyssum, snapdragons... it makes you realize why all the gardeners wait for spring.

Having spent last weekend out in the desert, this weekend was (mostly) devoted to trimming the rapidly growing grass and installing shelves into the kids' bedroom closet.

The grass always makes me think. For one, I kind of love grass and sure enough when I was thinking about it while mowing a young, tattooed couple walked by and the woman sniffed the air. "I know", I said, "It smells like summer." And it does for me. And nothing feels like a better accomplishment than mowing a fresh carpet of grass.

The sad fact is, what lies beneath the surface. Yes, I'm going eco Nazi on all of you. I can't lie and say that I don't live in a Mediterranean climate, I do. I can't tell anyone who has watched Chinatown all the way through that the fight to bring water to this dusty little town led more than one person to their early grave. I know, I know. But I'm not preaching, I'm just trying to be realistic. I love the grass, but it's not really grass anyone uses. It's that sad little area between the sidewalk and the street. The area officially owned by the city yet maintained by the homeowner (as we discovered when our tree needed to be cut down because it was breaking the sidewalk and our main sewage line). It makes a convenient walkway for people avoiding the onslaught of matillija poppies when they come into bloom and reach over the sidewalk.

I mean, it's a waste.

I dutifully mow it once a week, trim it every other week, water it two to three times a week during the hot season, and fertilize it with a nice organic fertilizer a couple times a year.

And thus my working title, "Working Backward".

I left the Midwest with a snooty Easterner's attitude. I was going to move to the city where people understood more my way of thinking. Probably true, as I might be more of an outcast there than here. But there were a lot of things, homey things, I thought were ridiculous, which have only made sense to me in the last ten years.

Like what? Can you believe canning? Making homemade cookies. Garden tomatoes. Feeding songbirds. Using your ingenuity to make due when you can't have what you crave.

That last one is the kicker. Yes, making due. I think of the people of the past and how we've found their garbage in piles and deduce what kind of people they were. I'm guessing they'd be the kind of people who wouldn't be able to stop vomiting when they saw the sort of excesses in which our society lived.

Lawn is an excess. And, crazily, it's part of a landscaping dream spread to my dry little corner of the country by people living in "it's raining even when it's dry" England.

The 50's were about moving forward, conquering nature. But I think we've figured out that's not exactly working the way we envisioned, with flying cars and... what the hell did the People of the Future eat?

I'm willing to say I've gone too far on some things. I don't need to be able to go to Paris tomorrow on a jet. That's a nicety.

I mean, hell, we've got a pretty cush life here, if you look around. I can go home to Nebraska every year, which was not always the case. I can afford to call my family and spend tons of time on the phone with them for dollars, not hundreds of dollars, as it was when I was growing up. I don't have to dry my laundry in the freezing winter down in the basement, as my grandmother did.

We've got it very nice, and maybe that sometimes makes me feel a wee bit guilty when I think (or I hear about in church) all those people have nothing. I mean, I've got more than a wonderful wife and two kids, I've got a roof over my head, a decent job, and a car to get me back and forth to work. Heck, my kids are going to a better school than I did growing up.

And the grass? The grass in comparison, isn't even a nicety, it's kind of this bad-tempered friend at a dinner party who keeps eating everyone else's dinner.

I'll keep you posted on how this goes.