Crabgrass

I let my lawn almost die this summer. Or David did, I’ll blame him. His position: lawns are meant to be brown in summer. “But this brown?” I say to him. We have an 1860s loveseat that, when I went to reupholster it, turned out to be stuffed with barn straw. That’s how our grass looks: like straw from the 1860s - heck, like straw from the cradle of the Baby Jesus. Even our new Japanese Dogwood which the nursery said was as tough as shoe leather started to wilt this summer.“Water it, fool!” they told me when I called for advice, and so I did and began watering the grass too, a project that shot riot-hose blasts of water right INTO my nasal passages every time I went to move the sprinklers. It’s those snaky hoses the sprinklers are attached to, which are not inanimate at all but twist and squirm and fight you like a wildcat – all before spraying you square in the face, like that lion did to Aunt Eleanor at the zoo that time.The result of all this irrigating? Crabgrass, which I am simply thrilled about but which David hates. “It’s the one thing I can’t stand,” he said the other day, though we wouldn’t HAVE crabgrass if he wasn’t in the complete thrall of our eco-Nazi daughter Carrie who is Against All Chemicals and keeps us from laying down any of that nice Agent Orange that they sell. Because I say What’s wrong with crabgrass? It’s tough, it’s nice and  green, and I happen to KNOW that Texans pay serious money to have their lawns seeded with something exactly like it.It’s a puzzler. And another way of saying that a column on this same subject (only without the jokes and the lion pee) is up on my “This Week’s Column” page -  until Labor Day weekend, anyway. After that it can be found orbiting the deep space of the Internet at one of any of 50 or 60 places like this one, now and forever Per Omnia Saecula Saeculorum.