Cleave To Me, Dandelion

Some years back the sweet, little five-year-old girl from next door approached after I had parked my car in our driveway.

"When are you going to cut your grass?" she asked shyly.

Now, I know she really didn't care if my grass was a bit long, which it was. It's not something that concerns five-year-olds. But little girls are notorious for picking up conversational tidbits from between mother and father, then repeating them publicly in candid fashion. And this little girl had spoken frankly like this before.

Although my yard isn't the bane of home sellers in our subdivision, I've never spent a great deal of time planting flowers, patching bare spots or killing dandelions either. In fact, weeds probably regard my corner lot as a sanctuary from the ChemLawn folks.

And I hear from ChemLawn a lot. I probably get a mailer a week from them, not all of them addressed to me either. Maybe my neighbors drop their flyers in my box too. Who knows?

I told Wendy that I don't consider ours' a lawn anyway. I consider it an ecoscape, filled with all varieties of the plant kingdom. Hea, this is Ann Arbor, right? Diversity is king, right?

Now on the side of my house, I do have a wildflower garden, which is an excuse to just "let it grow" whatever it is. Something took root there which kept growing and growing and is now a woody shrub two stories tall. My sister-in-law calls it a giant weed. I call it a Mediterranean Poplar. Not because that's what it is, but because it sounds classy.

Now I could make excuses for myself. For instance, I have terrible allergies. Wendy says I look ten years older in the spring with the circles under my puffy, burning eyes. But I won't use that as my defense. Not now.

If a neighbor sometime asks me, "When are you going to do something about your yard?" my reply will be simple.

"I don't do yardwork. I have a blog."