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neighbors are talking about our lawn
Friday, August 26 2005
I was at P&T Surplus today mainly to look for large sheets of copper for the collector array of my solar project.
Unfortunately, though, there were no sheets large enough to serve in the single panel I have in mind, and it's not worth my time to try to fuse multiple sheets when the price per unit weight of the copper is the same no matter how big the sheet is. Perhaps copper is going to be too difficult to obtain in sufficiently large sheets and I should resign myself to using sheets of galvanized steel roofing instead. That stuff is cheap, and if I can solder to it my efficiency won't be bad at all. From what I've read, it's possible to get the vast bulk of the efficiency pie with inexpensive materials. That last ten possible percent comes at an increasingly unjustifiable price. Also, copper weighs a lot more than steel (or aluminum), and weight is one of my limiting factors.
This afternoon Gretchen went to the mailbox and was stopped by our neighbors to the west, "the Greenhouses." They're great people: irreverent liberals who have been living in the same house for fifty years. But they wanted to know from Gretchen when if ever we were going to mow our grass. Truth is, I haven't cut it in weeks, and the most obvious patch near the road, an area of perhaps 2500 square feet in size, hasn't been mowed in two years because we're hoping it reverts to forest over the years and comes to provide a buffer between us and the road. But such casualness with lawns is well outside of the mainstream in suburban and rural America, even (evidently) among its most enlightened and open-minded citizens. There must be an unwritten law in this country that states that if one owns land, one must mow every reasonably-accessible square foot thereof. Certainly there is no provision in neighborly opinion allowing for either multi-week mowing delays or the deliberate reversion of lawn to forest. To not mow one's lawn in accordance with unwritten law is viewed the same as bad hygiene, only it's even worse because it affects the appearance of the entire neighborhood in a way that, to the conventional upstanding lawn mower (I mean the person, not the machine) defies reason. People out here like to have large parcels not because they want a buffer between their house and the next, but because it means they can play English squire over a vast swath of green.
But of course the lawn is just an arbitrary paradigm, nearly as burdensome to our culture as the paradigm of cattle raising was to the Greenland Norse. It's entirely possible to enjoy owning land that is not covered with a thick coat of inch long grass. It's also possible to go happily through life without bullying those around you with paradigms that make no sense.
The funny thing is, of all our neighbors, the ones I would have most expected to complain about the state of our lawn are the people who live in the 1970s-style house across the street. I used to call them something like "the 1970s House People," but a more apt name would be "the Fussies" or "the People Who Hire Others to do All Their Household Chores" ("PWHOTDATHC"). The Greenhouses have a large immaculate lawn, but the lawn of the Fussies is even more perfect, due mostly to the truckload of Mexicans that comes to whip it into shape on a weekly basis.
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