The Yard, Reviewed

I think it was on a page I removed at some point over the years, but I once mentioned how annoying I found San Franciscans who had a pre-programmed political response to even the most innocuous statements, like “it’s nice outside today” or whatever.

If you mentioned the nice weather, these folks would inevitably launch into a tirade about global warming or the rainforest or corporate-controlled weather media. If you said you were hungry and thinking about lunch, you’d hear all about some famine in sub-Saharan Africa. If you said you were feeling particularly good (or bad) that day, you’d get an unsolicited lecture about disease control in Thailand or the pain of suffering farm animals in Bolivia.

I got one of those responses today, following my relatively benign comments the other day about how I don’t like yard work. I was pretty much informed in no uncertain terms that lawns (and presumably Mark and I, by association) are “evil” and that the very act of our having a landscaped patch of land at all was somehow the precursor to a catastrophe of global proportions.

It pretty much made me want to go out and plant a flowerbed full of non-native plants and then spray at least one can of every aerosol pesticide I could find all over them. If nothing else, it made me appreciate the yard (and my hubby’s work in it) just that much more.