Oh no. It's starting to get warm.
I heard some flies buzzing around the screen door the other day -- one of the signature sounds of the Australian summer.
It sent a prickle down my spine.
You see, our sprinklers broke down a year ago, and we still haven’t fixed them. Partly because the colossal power of my family's combined procrastination could power a second Large Hadron Collider, and partly because the problem does not involve a simple fix, like a new sprinkler head or a pipe join.
Once upon a time some brainiac built a fence at the front of our house. A fence that is purely ornamental and completely useless because it does not have a gate. The fence posts are reinforced with cement, and one of the fence posts is right next to the sprinkler solenoid, so the sprinkler solenoid is also reinforced with cement and no one can get to it.
So we took turns hand-watering the lawn for three months, shouted "Woohoo!" when the rains came, ran back inside the house to the TV/Internet/Wii, and never came out again.
And now, my friends, now we are reaping what we have sown. That is, we have sown the seeds of laziness, and we are going to harvest a bumper crop of hot, sweaty labour.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully sick of the suburban front lawn. The only people with lush, emerald frontage in our neighbourhood are the rich folk who have Jim's Mowing parked on their verge every week, or the sweet pensioner couple who spend all their time in the garden and have forty rose bushes and seventeen bird feeders*.
In our garden, grass refuses to grow where it is meant to (that giant bare patch in the middle of the front yard) and thrives in places where it looks awful (in the flower beds) or requires armour-clad extraction (underneath the bougainvillea). In addition, it demands regular weeding, fertilising, aerating and de-beetling. That's more work than I put into my relationship, and it doesn't even buy me flowers.
If there were an award for most useless home feature, I would like to nominate the front lawn.
(In number two spot would be the water fountains that three of our neighbours have. Here is what these things say to me when I walk past them on the way to the bus stop. Hello! I live in a land of drought and think that having a useless device that evaporates water twice as fast is a good idea! Lalalalala!)
Where was I? Ah yes, the front lawn, one of my many nemeses.
It may look small, that oblong of green between the front door and the verge, but to a human with a garden hose, it takes on the dimensions of an aircraft carrier.
At least we've learnt a lesson from our slothful ways. When you are standing there watering every inch of lawn, as opposed to being detached from the whole experience by an automated reticulation system, you realise that you are wasting an incredible amount of a finite resource.
Many thoughts run through my head as I watch myself sprinkle perfectly good drinking water onto something we can’t even eat or sell. Somewhere, someone much less fortunate than we are, is walking miles and miles through hot, barren ground to acquire a fraction of this amount of water. Slightly more fortunate families share a single tap or well with the rest of the village. The water I am using is enough to do several loads of washing, or water a large crop of fruit and vegetables. It is enough uncontaminated water to clean hands, bodies, food and utensils so that disease doesn’t spread.
Why do we have these frivolous water suckers? What is the point of a front lawn, apart from having something green to cover that bit in between the front door and the verge? No one really uses it, not when most of the fun stuff goes on in the backyard where passers-by can't gawk at you.
Does anyone here treasure their front lawn? Or do you just give it a passing glance on the way from the garage to the front door? If you could get rid of it tomorrow, would you, and what would you replace it with?
* One day that nice couple will move out and those starving corellas are going to develop a taste for human flesh. You mark my words.