Saturday, December 1, 2007

On the Futility of Human Endeavor

I present for your consideration the following photograph taken in our backyard, and I would like to draw your attention to the grass. Yes, that's right, the grass.


Notice: the grass in the background is of a dull green color, and laced with big patches of brown. If you could get up close and look at it, you would see that much of this "grass" consists of weeds--puncture vine, crab grass, Dallas grass, broadleaf weeds, dandelions, wild clovers, and even some wild mint. In some parts of the yard, there isn't that much actual grass present--it's all weed.

Notice: the grass in the foreground is of a rich, deep, lush green color. There is a little bit of broadleaf weed present, but not a whole lot; most of what's there is honest-to-goodness, thin-leaf grass.

Now, this is a source of no end of bewilderment and frustration on our part. The yard on the other side of the walk, is where the grass is supposed to be greener. After all, that's where we have the sprinklers running; that's where we've re-seeded from scratch twice; that's where we've been mowing; that's where we've done all our fertilizing.

The yard on the near side of the walk, however, is intended to be part of a planter, in which we will ultimately be putting tree bark or mulch of some kind. All we've done to it is occasionally hit it with Round-Up to kill off all the weeds. Aside from that, we've been ignoring it; we've been walking and driving wheel-barrows all over it as I've been working on the walkway and patio. And yet, as soon as the winter rains started up this October, it sprouted some of the prettiest, lushest winter grass you've ever seen in your life. Our planters are, in most places, a whole lot prettier than our yard, where we've been fussing over the grass for several years now.

Do we just have that much of a brown thumb, or is this a case of God trying to tell us something?

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