I want your lawn.
I'm not just saying this for effect. I'm telling the truth. I've actually had this thought as I've driven past your house, with its beautiful, wide, sloping expanse of emerald green grass with wide-open southern exposure, mowed in perfect, symmetrical, laser-guided lines, and its single garden bed bordering the front porch filled with pansies, in the middle of which stands a little garden gnome with that cute pointed red hat holding a sign saying "welcome."
"I want that lawn," I’ve said to myself.
I'm not proud of these thoughts. But, neither am I going to pretend I'm a saint that I'm not. These thoughts just happen to me, as thoughts sometimes do.
Just today, the family and I returned from a week at the cottage. Even before we pulled into the drive, my eyes and those of my wife began scrutinizing the four 4x8 raised garden beds I dug last year, bordering the driveway on our neighbours' side of the yard.
Was everything alright? Were the plants wilting without a week's watering, or had there been enough rain? What about the leaf-rot on the tomato plants that was spreading before we left? Had it continued to spread, or had the plants recovered?
Before I dug those four garden beds I checked with the neighbours. "No problem," they said. "There's actually a few feet on that side of the driveway that's your property. It's all yours."
In the process of digging the beds, I cut the wire of their invisible fence. Whoops. But they were gracious about it, and said they thought that might happen, and moved the wire a few feet further to the west, away from our driveway. Their dogs have not dug up our gardens. This invisible fence business really works (The kids, on the other hand, are a different matter).
My only regret is that I only dug four garden beds, when in reality there's space for five. It's amazing how much you can fit into a 4x8 garden bed, if you're clever with the use of space. One more bed is nothing to pooh-pooh, and I'm not quite sure why I didn't go all the way.
This spot is the only full southern exposure we have on our property, so in those four garden beds we have our most sun-dependent plants: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and lots and lots of basil.
Well, "lots" is a relative term. In reality, I wouldn't mind if every one of those four beds (and the fifth I neglected to dig) were filled only with basil. In a few weeks' time, well before danger of frost, we would harvest all that basil, and mix it together with olive oil, romano cheese and pine nuts, and can it for the long winter to come.
As it is, only half of one bed is planted with basil. Sadly, we only have enough basil to put basil on...well...everything, for a couple of months. Throughout mid-July, August and early September we cook everything with basil. We fry the fresh green beans and zucchini with basil. We stuff our chickens with basil. Our salads are constituted of half lettuce and arugula, and half basil, with other herbs (like dill) filling in the gaps.
Because basil, after all, is God's greatest gift to man, next only (perhaps) to arugula, which my wife and I eat by the bushel-full during these few, verdant, all-too-short Canadian summer months. Arugula (and basil) salad for breakfast. Arugula (and basil) salad for lunch. Arugula (and basil) salad for dinner.
I'm not exaggerating.
But imagine...just imagine, for one glorious moment, that I had your lawn. (And trust me, I do imagine it.)
Perhaps, just to be perverse and to prove a point, I would grow nothing but basil on that long, sloping lawn of yours, with its southern exposure, 10-hours-a-day of full sunshine and cute little garden gnome. Basil to make enough pesto for us to be able to eat pesto for breakfast, lunch and dinner, every single day, all the way from October to the following July, when the basil would return to us in all its sweet and spicy glory.
And not just anybody's pesto. Not supermarket pesto with its "sunflower oil" and so-called "parmesan". But our pesto, with our basil. (I wish I could say our parmesan and olive oil, but c'mon, let's be realistic.)
I don't mean to sound ungrateful. And I'm not, really. Most of the time, in fact, I'm chock full of gratitude. It's become something of a point of pride with me, really. I like my life. In fact, I really, really like my life.
I love my little reproduction Victorian house on its quiet dead-end street in a tiny hamlet in historic Ontario. I like the what to most people in the world no doubt would seem a princely property, with the crab-apple tree that blooms every May into full splendour in the back yard, and the sugar maple tree and trio of healthy, blooming magnolia trees in the front.
I love my wife, my kids, my cat, my neighbours. And I love my ten or so 4x8 garden beds, which bring me so very, very much joy from spring to fall every year.
But sometimes...sometimes (as I've been trying to explain!) I really, really do just want your lawn.
Take today, for instance. As I mentioned, we came back from a glorious week at the cottage we rent every year in the Muskokas. For those who aren't in the know, the Muskokas is one of the best things about Canada. It's a region of lakes, lakes and more lakes. You can hardly throw a rock without hitting a different lake. And not just any lakes. Little, private, gem-like lakes surrounded with pine and spruce forests. Lakes filled with pure, crystalline water that's like silk on the skin. Cool, refreshing, peaceful.
Just the other night, a little after 11:00, I kayaked out into the middle of the lake on which this particular cottage is situated, following the reflection of the crescent moon on the perfectly still water. Then I sat in the middle of the lake, the water lapping about my barque, and listened to the loons calling to one another from lake to lake, and stared in dumbfounded amazement at the Milky Way.
It might seem like I'm showing off again, I suppose. But I'm not. My point is simply to point out that I'm not ungrateful. Like I mentioned, I love my life, occasional moonlit lakes and loons and all.
But when my wife and I pulled into the driveway, we saw the tomatoes and peppers and zucchini and eggplants. And everything seemed good. The tomatoes were ripening. My jalapeno pepper plants were showing off an unprecedented bounty of long, glistening green fruit, awaiting just a little cream cheese and a little bacon, and a few minutes in the oven, to be nothing short of heavenly perfection.
In the back yard (the north side), the bush beans and pole beans were weighed down with the fruit of our week's neglect. I spent the afternoon peering and prying and picking. And at the end of it, dumped the dividend of my labours on the counter. A mountain (it seemed to me in the moment) of yellow and green beans, of different varieties, some thick, some thin, all delectable.
A beautiful sight. My daughter fried some up (with basil) for lunch. She fried up some more (with basil) for dinner. And tomorrow, I have no doubt, my kids will pack a whole lot of them (with basil?) into jars with a salt brine and hot peppers, which concoction in a couple of days will produce an astonishingly tangy lacto-fermented beany treat that they will devour before you can say tickety-boo (which, by the by, does not take very long to say).
And that's the problem, isn't it? Because, if (as I've been trying to get at) I had your lawn, with all its sprawling expanse, and its full southern exposure, and its 10-hours-a-day of full sunshine, and its cute little garden gnome, boy-oh-boy but I would have beans. And there's no way my children could devour them in the time that it takes to say tickety-boo. That mound of beans on my counter, of which I was so inordinately proud a few minutes ago? Peanuts. Nuts. Nada. A molehill to a mountain.
Beans to comfort me through the long, dark winter nights. Beans to give away to every neighbour who shows the slightest interest. Beans to pickle and can in jars to line the top of the cupboards in our kitchen. Beans to fill shelves yet-to-be-built in our basement just to store the beans. Beans aplenty to fill my children's bellies from September to July, no matter how many times they say tickety-boo.
Yes, I drive past your lawn, and I think to myself, "What a bloody waste. What a travesty. All that...grass. Think only of the beans to be grown! Let alone the basil! My goodness, the basil! The beans!"
Oh yes, I've got tomatoes, and peppers, and basil, and beans, and zucchini, and arugula and arugula and arugula. And some kale. And some carrots. And a little dill, lettuce, and a few tomatillo plants just for variety (they make a delightfully tangy salsa, together with my jalapenos).
But...if I only had your lawn. What I would grow! The thought of the potatoes alone is enough to make a grown man weep. It does make me weep. As it is, I don't even grow potatoes right now. No space. No southern exposure. Not that I'm complaining, of course.
It's just that...if I had your lawn...
Boy oh boy.
Can't imagine a more depressing passtime than gardening but this made me smile from beginning to end. Especially when I realized you didn't want my lawn for all its beautiful lush grass, to escape the masochism of gardening..
Soon, all our lawns will be gardens out of necessity.