The Muddled Male

Weed War

By Bob Stevens, the Muddled Male

         Ann and I are in the middle of a disagreement about weeds.  Actually it is kind of a pitched battle that begins each year as the snow disappears.  The battle doesn’t end until the snow appears again in the late fall.  Ann is of a mind that anything green in our yard, even a weed, is better than dirt.  When we first moved here Ann was carefully tending several green plants with pretty yellow flowers not realizing that we were harboring criminals.  We might have been thrown in jail had a friend not warned us that we were nurturing Dyers Woad, a notoriously noxious and illegal weed.  Dyers Woad is so hated that some counties offer a bounty and will pay a reward to anyone bringing in a Dyers Woad plant still attached to its root.  In honor of the green plants with pretty yellow flowers that I then had to execute with 2-4-D, Ann had me transplant sprigs of sagebrush around our yard in an attempt to at least have something growing that would cover the dirt.  And boy did they grow.  Sagebrush is not only hearty, it is prolific.  Now I have to do something to get rid of the sagebrush, when Ann isn’t looking. 

            I admit that we have lived here a little more than six years and we still have no landscaping.  The reason is that I am not done planning.  Engineers, you see, have this uncontrollable need to develop a plan and then hone it over and over and over in an attempt to account for every variation and possibility that does or might ever exist.  I recognize that an engineer’s approach to a job can sometimes be irritating, especially to a wife who is in a hurry, but I am also a husband who hates landscaping and I have discovered that if I never get done planning I will never have to landscape.  Remember, now, this is our little secret.  You have to promise that you will never breathe a word of my ploy to Ann, my wife. 

            Now back to our current disagreement.  Ann, you will remember, thinks green is good but dirt is bad.  Now I don’t mind green, but I hate unevenness and I have been trying to convince Ann that I need to mow our weeds to give them a uniform, sculptured look.  Ann, on the other hand, thinks that cutting the tops off weeds causes them to yellow then turn brown.  In her mind that is worse than dirt.  If the truth were known, Ann’s problem is that she just doesn’t trust my weed identification skills and is hesitant to trust me to cut the weed-weeds and avoid those she calls flower-weeds.  A weed weed, by the way, is a weed that looks like a weed and even Ann thinks it should be executed.  A flower-weed, on the other hand, has the pleasing look of a flower blossom for a brief period of its life cycle just before it begins to shoot seeds out into the air in an attempt to engulf the neighborhood.

And so I am now proposing that we remove the weeds altogether and cover the yard with artificial turf, since that will always appear sculptured and we will never have to water, fertilize, or mow.  The best part of all is that I have to start my planning all over again.  If I am lucky I will be able to make the planning last until our youngest daughter takes our car keys away and moves us into a care center where someone else will tend the landscaping.