- submitted by L. Keenan on 06/10/2008
My Neighbor's Lawn Needs an Intervention
By Linda Keenan
When is the moment when one becomes officially and irretrievably an adult? Is it when you get married? Become a baby-talking, poopy-obsessed parent? Turn into a hyper-vigilant room parent/mommy monster?
No, although I have reached all these crucial milestones. I think for me the clincher was this: the moment I went ripsh*t over the uncontrolled flora at the house around the corner. My neighbor's lawn needs a Brazilian, and by that, I don't mean a lawn guy. I mean a landscaping version of the take-no-prisoners wax job. In feeling this way, I have yet again become a person I once scorned, and I can't think of a more precise definition of becoming an adult than that.
It was at T-Ball one day, while quizzing the ladies about their latest suburban quandaries, when a Mom friend I'll call Anita posed this perennial dilemma: how long does the grass have to grow before you tell the neighbor to put the beer can in the cozy, get your tuches off the porch, and mow your damn lawn?
Her answer is: never. Actually in an email to me later, she said: NEVER! Despite the fact that her 4-year-old calls the neighboring crap-hole the ‘messy' house, despite the "overgrown grass, weeds, and basic state of disarray," she wants to keep her mouth shut, to maintain a pleasant neighborly coexistence. Basically that means she doesn't want to end up on Wife Swap (though Anita is quite cute, and it would be really hilarious to see her whip off those fashionable sunglasses and lunge over the table at the end of the show post-mortem to throttle the incorrigible slobs).
Anita's husband, however, sounds like he might be ready for a reality show smackdown. She says he is obsessed with the neighbors' lack of care and interest, and feels a well-maintained lawn should be an extension of homeowner pride. Not a weekend goes by that they don't wring their hands over it.
Anita says she has always been more tolerant of the chaos but lately it's been getting to her, too. "I am obsessed with one particularly weedy patch (I stare at it each time I am at the kitchen sink) and now, I am actually rooting for the weeds to see how bad it will get before anything, if anything, gets done." She says she has become
"that crazy woman" who won't let the neighbor's kids or their friends trample over her well-manicured lawn.
Just a few days later I was to become "that crazy woman" myself. I had gotten in touch with a realtor I know, Sue Proctor at Coldwell Banker, to suss out how much the haunted house next door can hurt the value of your home. Her answer: a lot. So much so that if you aren't comfortable as a seller having the ‘conversation,' she will do it for you. In the peppiest way possible, of course. We are talking about realtors here.
It was then that I started to look around my own new neighborhood, acutely aware that since buying my house a year ago I have lost some 5-figure amount because of the housing bust. And there it was, not next door thankfully, but right around the corner, a house uncomfortably comparable to mine (I looked up the stats), that looks like spooky crazy-town. The army of gray dandelion tops makes it look like an Afghan poppy field. Decrepit toys serve as unwitting weed pots.
Now I used to have a certain affection, pre-home ownership, for the town crack-pots: they must be real characters living there, I would think. I bet all the kids run by this house in pretend terror on Halloween; they'll probably remember that place forever. I bet all these suburban drones are driven mad by their ramshackle eccentricity.
Well, reader, meet your latest drone, and now, finally, I can say I'm an adult. By the way, if the owners of crazy-town are reading this, I know a great guy to do that Lawn-zilian for you.
Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy....read more rants
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