A while back, I heard someone remark that careful lawn maintainence is a neighborly obligation. If that's true, I've been a rotten neighbor.
I keep my yard mowed, though I always don't break the weed whacker out after mowing, and the margins of my yard and driveway can get a bit shaggy. Honestly--if I could let my entire yard revert to meadow, I would. To my way of looking at things, lawn care is one of the greatest waste of time and resources imaginable. But if you're going to live away from the concrete, some measure of it is unavoidable. And I can understand that no one wants to live next to the town dump.
My foremost maintainence concern at the moment is my driveway. The gravel topping is getting thin in spots, the sides (my driveway is built on a raised berm)) are beginning to erode into the lawn, and large sections of it are actually reverting to meadow; I now actually need to mow the head of my driveway. I'm going to put on a fresh load of gravel on it this summer and line it with larger stones to help keep the grave IN the driveway, but before I do that, I need to clear the weeds, and this is where matters get complicated, and the duties of neighborliness again come into question.
I have a acquired several new neighbors this year--tenants, one might call them. It appears that four rabbits have taken up residence in my yard, or at least have been spending a fair amount of time there. I've located two burrows, and I expect I'd find others if I explored under my spruce trees further. Though we've often seen rabbits in our yard, we've never seen them as much as we have this year. As my wife says, we're having a Bunnyssance. Last Sunday morning as I was walking to my car to go to church, I saw one of the rabbits nibbling on some of the weeds in the greenest part of the driveway. I stood watching him for a while, and remembered that I often jumped one from there. This gave me a sinking feeling. I had been planning to spray Roundup on the larger patches of grass and weeds in the driveway, prior attempts at smothering or pulling the weeds having failed. But I hated the thought of killing rabbits that might come to munch on the greenery within a few days of spraying (Roundup remains toxic to animals for up to two weeks after applying).
So to appease different sets of neighbors with conflicting interests in the condition of my driveway, I'll be working a little harder than I'd planned to spruce it up. I'll be conducting some more intensive smothering operations, essentially coating my driveway in black plastic for most of the rest of the summer. My two-legged neighbors probably won't be thrilled by the sight of that (and I expect it might confuse the one who patrols his driveway with a bottle of Roundup every week, taking out any grass or plantain with the temerity to sprout there). But hopefully they'll appreciate the end result. And my four-legged neighbors will live to find another salad bar. And...I can put the job of laying gravel and installing a rock border off until the end of the summer. Everyone wins.
Maybe this counts as an effort toward sustainable homeownership. Who'd have thought the wish to put a truckload of stones on my driveway might tie me to one of the great social concerns of our time? I expect, though, that if we looked closely, we'd see that most of our actions did raise issues of sustainability, and of our relation to the lives that border ours.
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Tonight I'm heading up to the Manistee for a few days of Hexing. Report to follow.
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