It may be the end of November, but fall is just now hitting Texas.
And with fall, comes leaves. Oh, those nasty, ugly, horrendous leaves! (They really should make a sarcasm font.)
My neighbors have long had a problem with my lawn care—or lack there of. I knew our next-door neighbors hated us (I won’t go into how I knew, but trust me they made it very clear), but didn’t know why until they unknowingly rented out their house out to some of our friends. Our neighbors told our friends they didn’t get along with us because we didn’t keep our lawn up. I’d love to tell them why.
In the last several years, I’ve become increasingly aware and respectful of God’s design. Let’s take a moment to think about God’s design for a tree.
- Leaves grow. They provide shade and clean the air.
- In the winter, they die and fall off.
- Throughout the winter, the leaves on the ground decompose, are eaten by microorganisms, and become nutrients in the soil.
- When spring comes, the tree and grass uses those nutrients through its roots to grow new leaves.
And the cycle continues, over and over, every season. Such a simple, beautiful design. It is a system with no waste.
Then mankind comes along. And, like many things, we think we can make a system that’s better. Let’s take a look at that system.
- Leaves grow. They provide shade and clean the air.
- In the winter, they die and fall off.
- How ugly! We rake up all those leaves and fill bags and bags to send off to the dump, stripping the land of its natural fertilizer and filling already-too-full landfills.
- When spring comes, we spray toxic, chemical fertilizers on the ground for the tree to eat—then invite our children to go out and roll around in the residue.
- All this so we can grow grass as much as possible in order to hack it down every weekend so it is uniform and exactly 2” high—wasting resources and emitting toxic fumes with our lawnmowers.
Not quite as beautiful.
So, my neighbors can be part of the herd if they’d like, but I won’t participate in such a ridiculous system simply for social gain. Because isn’t that the reason we do it? Simply to have our lawn admired by our neighbor? Surely we can find other ways to gain favor in the eyes of our peers.
Everyone else can take it, but me, I’m going to leave it.
Simply,
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Bah humbug to your neighbors! A friend of mine in Missouri let her yard go wild. On a whim, she and her husband put in plant markers to identify some of the plants in her yard. I don’t know if it’s because her husband is a professor or what it was about those markers but apparently her neighbors interpreted it as them cultivating a serious garden (and not just letting their yard go wild) and she said she was astounded when she first started getting compliments. Perhaps her “garden” tapped into people’s insecurities about not being sophisticated – ?? – but I thinks it’s a hoot and my hat’s off to her for not having to mow, rake or pull leaves!