Grass Experience

For many years our aross-the-back-fence neighbors were an older retired couple called Margaret and Frank. They were nice for the most part except that Margaret was obsessed with gardening and weeding her back yard and with the possibility of contamination from weeds or “trash trees” in our yard. We are not gardeners but we do keep the lawn mowed and get the overgrowth cleared out. However we don’t stress about weeding the perennials or about what’s growing out there.

Margaret would ambush us with requests whenever she encountered us on the street or at the local voting precinct, to dig up “trash trees,” as she referred to any tree she didn’t like the looks of in our backyard, all the while informing us that we really didn’t want Sarah running around under low class, tacky trees or shrubbery. This was all the more weird and annoying because she was quite aware that Sarah was disabled and not doing any running, walking, strolling or other physical play in the backyard, around either trashy or high-class trees.

One evening when Sarah was around 2 or 3 I saw Margaret’s number come up on our phone and I answered and knew I’d kind of had it with all this gardening crap. Margaret must have known I was already irritated because she awkwardly said to me in a chirpy tone of voice “Hello. I’m calling to talk to you about your grass experience.” (!!) And then launched into her usual wisdom about digging up trees, shrubbery, weeds etc. lest Sarah be exposed to them somehow in her nonexistent perambulations through our backyard.

I told her very bluntly that I worked full-time and had a young child with cerebral palsy. That she was welcome to come on over and dig up weeds and trees in our backyard if it was important to her, but that we were not going to be doing that. Ever. Period. And I hung up. She did not speak to me again after that, and I can’t say it was a problem for me.

(By the way, Max thinks that when Margaret asked me about my “grass experience” I should have just detailed every bong hit and doobie from back in the day as if it were perfectly natural for her to call me up to inquire. I suppose that’s one way to have handled it.) After Margaret and Frank moved away, a young couple bought the house and they now have two small boys. They are not big gardeners either. I left them a little note last year because there was a wasp’s nest that they hadn’t seen growing in one of their azalea bushes and I didn’t want the kids to get stung.