"A Pain in the Grass"

By Jerry Zezima

According to an old saying, which can probably be attributed to my neighbors, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

But now that my neighbors have installed a new fence, and a landscaper has worked turf magic on my once-barren property, I can happily say that the grass is green on my side, too.

For the past several years, I had lived in the Death Valley of the neighborhood. The front and back yards looked like they had been manicured with a flamethrower. The place was so desolate that I was afraid of attracting rattlesnakes and vultures.

When my wife, Sue, and I bought our house in 1998, the property was luxuriant, like a fairway at the Masters Golf Tournament or the top of Brad Pitt’s head.

Then I became the chief groundskeeper. Using an asthmatic power mower, I had to cut what was becoming the grassy version of a receding hairline.

Not only did I do a spotty job, but I left clippings all over the yard. Even worse, I didn’t trim the edges of the property to Sue’s satisfaction.

So she fired me.

“But I was working for free,” I said incredulously.

“It wasn’t even worth that,” she responded.

Our next move was to hire a landscaping company that since then has cut the grass, picked up all the clippings and trimmed meticulously. They’ve also done the spring and fall cleanups.

It’s been well worth the money.

We also hired a lawn service, ostensibly to enrich the grass by dropping seed, spreading fertilizer, applying weed killer, sprinkling lime and, once a year, aerating the entire property.

It was not worth the money.

As the yard began to develop more bare patches than the Bonneville Salt Flats, I asked various representatives of the lawn service what I could do to improve the situation.

“Do you water regularly?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “And that’s not counting the times I get up in the middle of the night.”

He said I should run the in-ground sprinklers for a short time every morning. Another rep said I should run them only twice a week but for a longer period of time. A third guy said I should run them every other evening for however long I thought was right.

The field manager suggested I rake up all the brown spots and do my own seeding.

“Isn’t that your job?” I said curiously.

“No,” he answered bluntly.

So, as Sue did with me, I fired him.

Then I called Vinny Pitre of O’Connell’s Landscaping, the Long Island company that had been cutting what little grass we had left.

Vinny came over, surveyed the pathetic landscape and gave me his expert assessment: “Your yard looks like hell.”

The solution, he said, was to thatch the entire property, cover it with topsoil and cover the soil with grass seed.

“It’s the right time of year to do it,” Vinny said, adding that I had to run the sprinklers twice a day, at dusk and overnight, for 30 minutes in each of our five working zones for about six weeks.

Mother Nature failed to cooperate because it didn’t rain for the first three weeks. And the sprinkler in the sixth zone was broken, so I had to water the side yard by hand with a garden hose twice every day, all while imagining a gargantuan water bill.

But eventually, like fuzz on a teenage boy’s cheeks, little green blades began to sprout from the earth.

“You’re doing a great job,” Vinny said when he came by for an inspection.

“Will my yard look as good as yours?” I asked.

“No,” Vinny answered flatly. “Nobody’s yard looks as good as mine. But you’ll have the best one in the neighborhood.”

Sue was happy to hear it.

“Finally,” I told her, “the grass will be greener on our side of the fence.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima