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splinterswerve
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
splinterswerve.hotmail.com
by Derek MacDougall
I never want to have a well kept lawn. I won't ever be in the front or back of my house making sure on a constant basis that all is perfectly straight and at a uniform height, with no strays. I will not re-create a cabin on my front porch. No fake well in the middle of my God's image of His kingdom Kentucky blue grass, criss-cross patterned, aerated, fertilized, edged, watered daily and obsessed over piece of useless shit. I won’t just blend in. I'll have three and four and five foot high wild plants and exotic weeds; vines that choke to kill. Bohemian red, purple and green flowers sprouting from the dead grass that once was a previous owner’s mistress. There will be rocks and a little path that no one can find. Birds of many species will live and feed there. It will eventually evolve its own weather system and rain will fall. You'll never catch me watering this beast.
They’ve banded together and formed a neighborhood beautification committee. Passing out one paged, folded green paper with badly photocopied shots of the perfect lawn. They wish for me to conform. To come out wild eyed with machete in hand to cut down my wilderness, give up my morals; to mow and tend and toil and lose my battle. The same one my Father fought with his hoe and spade in his tiny thicket of sand, cacti, and Cayman pond. Granddad trying to keep around the giant dead trees that were still much alive during Indian summer. But, I’m not alone. John down the street has a big truck unloading boulders and lichen kits on his once lawn. We’ll not give up to this mass.
The neighbours are pissed. All around my jungle lawn are these green cross-stitched carpets with little men tending to them and their wives watching from behind the shadowed screen door. At the next house she's put out a painting of begonias and sunflowers with a barn wood bird house in the center. A painting on a front lawn, hanging on some old, vintage easel… I shudder. All over the block, men and missuses tend to their little mad houses of lawn admirership outside in the heat, sipping spring waters, having the time of their simple, folded-up lives. Making the hedges impeccable rectangles with zero proof of outlaw growth. They're all out there at the same time of day, the Joneses and the Smiths and the Buchanans all toiling away and watching each other, they begin to wear yellow and green suits to my eyes, laughing like hyenas, some crouched over with magnifying glasses to spy on any invading plant species or longer blades that escaped the initial third cut. And like I said, they're hysterical. I can see, smell and taste the sour, sweaty gossip, and how the women want me to leave the block and die and how the men would love to burn down my lawn and make some example of me. But knowing they cannot burn such things away, being so full of life. They can only protest our difference behind our backs. Forever, if they wish, as I feed my wildwood, listening to the birds listening for me.