I Love Lawn Gnomes

I’ve discovered the purpose of those houses whose front yards are plastered with various lawn decorations of all sorts of shapes & sizes. From children silhouettes playing hide & seek, the cow tail hose holder, pink flamingos and even the Virgin Mother in a ½ bathtub….it is to distract you from the crazy person “gardening”.

I’ll admit, I hate doing yard work. I have a black thumb (yet strangely the rosebushes that were in our yard long before our arrival; flourish every year, though I hack them down to nubby stumps every fall) and have attempted to kill every plant within my reach. I’d just as soon plow & pave my entire yard, paint it green and pretend it was a “lawn”.

My typical day out weeding goes something like this:
“Is that a weed? Honey!? Do you know what the hell that is? Is it supposed to be growing there?” No response, save for my oldest screaming, “Can I have your baby shovel (referring to my gardening spade)? I want to dig a big hole.” Fabulous. “No Digging!”
“Honey???”

At this point, I usually march into our garage in search of weed killer of some sort. In the process, about 6 different things from a shelf fall on my head. A spider lands on my face. I scream like a small child. My arms swat. More things fall from the shelf. I smash my big toe into the kids’ wagon. I then trip over a soccer ball, and land ass-over-teakettle on the ground, weed killer in hand and only partially wounded.

I hobble like Quasimodo back into my front yard. My hair is askew and covered in cob webs…I think I’m bruised up like a prize fighter. I’ve started mumbling to myself, “#%&*@!...weeds, $^*@!! that I have to do...” I’ve started gesturing with my hands as I encounter the hole dug near a tree in the yard, you know – the apparent escape effort of my daughter to evacuate her current hell & find her way to China. I drop the weed killer…it lands on my toe (you know, the one that just blasted a wagon?), I swear some more.

Finally, I blast the bejesus out of the offender in my mulch. Right then my husband walks up and informs me that I just sprayed the kids’ daisies that they planted last week. Noting the car driving by with lookie-loos as I start to pull my hair out…I realize how much more incognito I’d look if only I had a lawn full of atrocious ornaments.