I am a bit depressed about events that I don’t have permission to tell you about. It isn’t something entirely bad, but it isn’t entirely good either. So, like all the other things that conspire to make my life miserable, I will blame it on lawn gnomes.
Yes, lawn gnomes are evil, and spread their misery to my yard and home. Back in the seventies we were shown the secret life of gnomes in the best-selling book by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen called simply Gnomes. What they don’t tell you in this book is that gnomes are closely related to gremlins. Gremlins tear apart engines on airplanes and cause all sorts of random bad stuff. Gnomes could care less about airplanes, but they do care about lawns and green growing stuff. Thus, the nightmare in my yard.
On July 29th the city of Carrollton notified us that we were in violation of yard maintenance regulations. The lawn is overgrown and the lawnmower is broken down. No matter what I do to repair the mower and get it restarted, nothing works. I am pretty nearly sure that the gnomes have clogged the air intakes in the engine, and they secretly re-clog it every time I clean it. They also do something to the trees. Now, I know, even though Ronald Reagan never quite figured it out, that trees themselves are not evil, and do not cause pollution. But gnomes have a strange relationship with trees, living in secret underground houses underneath the roots. The past three years the trees in my yard have been pumping out dead leaves to bury everything in our yard under three layers of leaves and old acorns. Now, this is rendered particularly suspicious by the fact that the trees are almost all live oaks, evergreen trees that have green leaves all year round. How can trees like these lose so many leaves on an almost constant basis? Gnomes. It has to be gnomes. The trees are not the only hyperactive plants filling the yard with raging greenery and detritus. Johnson grass, dandelions, thistles, and other weeds fill every corner of the yard.
Now, I know I need to keep the yard clean and better groomed than I have managed. It becomes hard when you have six incurable diseases, including diabetes, arthritis, COPD, psoriasis, BPH, and hypertension. I am too often in pain or feeling ill to get the yard work done. So why can’t the kids or the wife do the work? I ask them this often. Apparently yard work is a man’s work and only a man can do it, a point my wife would never be caught dead making except for the fact that she would have to do the work if she didn’t argue that. So, there it is. I have a large amount of work to do that will not stay done, and the lawn gnomes, for their own amusement, keep making it more and more impossible to do. And that is definitely not why I am depressed, but it is all I am allowed to say. (And, no, the gnomes are not holding my dog hostage.)
Catch a Falling Star 