Lawn Mower Blues

By Jane Farrell

I never liked Joni Mitchell all that much, but I worship the title of her 1975 album: The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It so perfectly sums up the subtle, well-mannered sounds of suburbia reaching for a uniformly watered stretch of grass.

Now I live in suburbia myself, and I can tell you that not only is there hissing, there’s an unbelievable amount of roaring. Lawn mower roaring.

People hit their lawns early in the morning; they stay out late. I’ve seen one man mow in the darkness, with a flashlight attached to his head. No one uses a manual mower (actually, a lot harder than it looks). They use gasoline-powered mowers, electric-powered motors and my favorite, the mini-tractor. A retiree across the street likes to go around and around his lawn on his tractor, leaving donut-shaped formations that look like surreal crop circles (remember them)?

Being new to suburbia, I had little idea of the attention paid to lawns and to yards. As long as it all looked decently neat, I thought, there would be no problem. I hired a genial, experienced mower to ride around the lawn every Thursday, and that, I thought, was that.

But of course it wasn’t. Apparently the bushes we thought were such great additions to the yard were actually weeds, and weeds, being the low plant on the horticultural totem pole, must be eliminated as soon as possible. (The mower tactfully conveyed this to me.) Or the neighbors will talk. And you don’t want the neighbors to talk.

The mower brought in two muscular college kids to pull and chop every weed, no matter how small or large. Afterward, the yard looked kind of bare to me, although we still had that overgrown, unattended herb garden to provide a touch of untamed nature.

And untamed nature is the very opposite of the lawn, a beautifully maintained area of grass that is, as the sociologist Thorstein Veblen said, is an example of “conspicuous consumption.” In other words, you don’t need it, but it’s a status symbol to have it. I myself would rather not have it.

It’s an inevitable part of where I live, though, so I might as well get used to it. I make jokes about people using nail scissors to clip errant blades of grass, or about the huge stone chicken my neighbor has inexplicably placed in the center of his lawn. (My weeds looked better than that!) But I’m part of it now – weeds, mower and all.

In fact, my attitude is changing a little more than I’d like it to. I recently drove by a house on the next block and saw that the front lawn was overrun with dandelions. “They should really do something about that,” I thought, before I could stop myself. “It looks so messy.”

Welcome to suburbia.