I am the god who waters the lawn--
—and has filthy fingernails.
So last spring, I talked with some nice landscapers about getting our motheaten front lawn patched with loam and seed, and we agreed upon a price and schedule, and while we were away late last week they came and did the patching.
Except, friends and colleagues, they didn’t patch the lawn. They covered the whole thing with loam and seeded it.
Reader, we were not prepared. (We do not have an in-ground sprinkler system, for starters. Did I mention that this is a huuuuuge lawn?)
A new lawn needs to be watered three times a day for fifteen minutes at a stretch, avoiding runoff, to produce germination and keep the baby grass alive.
Folks, this has been an adventure, and for the first few days we were trying to complete this process by hand (frankly impossible) but we now have a Rube Goldberg agglomeration of hoses, splitters, and sprinkler heads that will hopefully keep our entire front yard from being a giant mudpit for the rest of time.
It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to run through the entire watering protocol, and this is the good outcome. I swear.
I feel tremendously foolish about the whole thing, especially as both Scott and I are trying to get books written and care for the horses and generally do all the things we need to do. And my gosh this has been and continues to be A Lot Of Work.
I did not know what I was getting into when we bought this large old house, and that’s for sure.
But this morning I noticed some tiny fragile blades of grass poking up on the side of the house and under the trees where it’s shady, so maybe this whole project hasn’t been entirely in vain and just made things worse than they were already? I’m still really worried about the front, which looks like a gravel pit covered in hoses.
But maybe…
I feel like this is kind of a metaphor for life. Home-buying, careers, love affairs, parenting, eldercare, just being alive and dealing with aging: we never know what we’re getting into.
If we did, we probably wouldn’t do it. But once you’re in the thick of it and doing what you’ve got to do, it’s pretty sweet, actually.