Weather and lawns

We walk most mornings past these new tennis courts, close to the Middle School. They've been busily in use early in the day all summer, but yesterday they were damp and forlorn.

We’ve gotten a lot of rainover the last couple of days, which we badly need. And Sunday! Almost autumnal—that dry air, that piercing golden light. Wonderful. But it’s been a very oppressive summer (for this old guy, it’s been early exercise or none at all). Grass everywhere is splotchy brown, and the water company has been making robo calls telling people not to water their lawns.

Woodbury is the home of many lawns I think of as “Republican.” Sown and tended with a solicitude seldom extended to humans;  chemically enhanced to Barry-Bondian proportions; obsessively clipped, trimmed, and cosseted; magnificent in their carpet-like perfection—and, of course, watered regardless of conditions. In my youth, there was only one of these in town, and when I went by it, I gazed in astonished admiration. Now they front every McMansion, and even little old bungalows. Chem-lawn vans clutter the streets.

Still, most Woodburians—even the majority Republican population, along with most of our dozen brave Democrats—just cut what lawn they’ve got, water with rainfall, and live with the usually adequate results. I, on the other hand, don’t actually have a lawn. I just have grass—several kinds of grass, actually, ranging from “big weed” to “crab”. I hack away at it periodically, a week or two after it needs it (sort of like haircuts). Neither Republican nor Democratic, my grass is simply a disgrace. I feel terrible about it.