It’s spring and men’s fancy turns to their lawn. Yes, their
lawn.
All over Gilroy, men are preparing for the annual lawn care
season. To men, this is a season like no other.
It’s spring and men’s fancy turns to their lawn. Yes, their lawn.
All over Gilroy, men are preparing for the annual lawn care season. To men, this is a season like no other. For women, it’s just spring – time to buy new shoes and an Easter hat we will wear only once. As for grass, unless it’s brown and dead or we have to do the mowing, we couldn’t care less.
But for men, spring means the grass is growing. It means it’s time to take the mower out and sharpen the blades. Time to go to the garden center and spend hours contemplating fertilizer and grass seed. And for some unfortunate souls, it’s time for their lawn envy to surface again.
Most men will not admit to having lawn envy, but the ladies in their lives know it exists. Lawn envy usually shows up when you first move into a neighborhood. You move in, you have a nice lawn. To keep the lawn nice, you need some tools. At first, most men start with a lawn mower. A simple tool that does the job.
And then it happens. A man drives down his street – maybe he stops to get the mail or chat with a neighbor. And he notices that right there on his very street is a house with a perfectly edged lawn. And that, my friends, is when lawn envy hits. Because when the man realizes that he DOESN’T have a perfectly edged lawn, well, he runs right down to Home Depot and buys the biggest edger in the store.
And it doesn’t stop there. Oh, no. You see, once the rest of the men on the street notice there is lawn edging taking place, they run right down to Home Depot too. And pretty soon the entire neighborhood is filled with perfectly edged patches of grass.
And then one day, somebody ups the ante. Yes, on a perfect spring day, with the sun shining and clouds floating overhead, a man rides down the street on his brand-new riding mower.
Nobody can compete with that. Or so you would think.
Because a few weeks later, another man goes one step further. He puts in a new lawn. It’s green and lush and not covered with tire tracks from kid’s bikes. Nobody has trampled it. It hasn’t felt the constant swat of a newspaper landing on it every afternoon. And there are no brown spots where the sprinklers don’t quite get it watered enough.
And every single man in the neighborhood is jealous.
They realize that their lawn isn’t what it once was. Oh sure, it’s perfectly edged. And sure they ride around on their riding mowers for two minutes every Sunday to keep their postage-stamp sized lawn looking its best. But it’s not new. So they gather around the new grass and praise it. And the owner of the new lawn is the undisputed King of the Green.
And for a while, this guy reigns supreme. The other men are filled with lawn envy. They come over on Sunday afternoons. They kick back and admire the greenness. They talk about fertilizer. They whisper about a guy two streets over who was busted for trying to sell bogus professional-grade fertilizer to unsuspecting victims. They admire the way that the King’s lawn has perfect mowing marks running through it.
And then inevitably, one of the men will put in a new lawn of his own. And the lawn wars will begin again.
Ah, spring. When a man’s fancy turns to lawns. Kind of makes you wish for winter, doesn’t it?
