We All Celebrate in Different Ways ...

As my birthday always falls on or near Mother’s Day, the family and I usually pick a day to celebrate both blended together, just the four of us, sometimes weeks after the actual dates have passed.

I’m not one for making a big deal about my birthday or Mother’s Day, or when we get around to celebrating it, even though I will make a huge deal out of everyone else’s special days. I always ask Jordan and Jamie to make me a card or write me a letter, we usually spend the day outside fishing or walking or somewhere with numerous furry creatures, and I specifically ask Jim not to buy me anything (which he has ignored each and every year of our marriage).

Field of Shame

This year, on my 45^th birthday, I took enormous pleasure (no sarcasm intended) cutting the grass in our 8,500 square foot backyard, decapitating hundreds of dandelions with every sweep of the mower. Oh the joy of chopping off those little bastards’ heads and sucking them into the catch bag. Once complete, six yard-waste bags were filled with festive-colored clippings of bright yellow and lush green, awaiting curbside pickup the next morning.

Hearty little flowers...

A total landscaping dork, I am even more excited about the lawn service coming tomorrow to chemically eradicate the remaining dandelions with heads, clover and gnarly sticker weeds. The service will also fertilize and seed in an effort to resurrect the remaining hundred or so blades of actual grass that still exist on our lawn. I only hope the rain holds off long enough for the potions to work their magic.

I took a picture to prove that I am not trying to be funny when I share Jim’s comment as he looked at the lawn with a look of total shock and disbelief over the weekend: “I swear to God it looks like we planted these on purpose. We couldn’t do this intentionally if we tried.”

I quoted Andrew V. Mason when I said, “if dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn,” but I realized I wasn’t laughing and neither was Jim.

It wouldn’t be half as bad if our neighbors were having the same problem – however, you can literally mark our property lines butting up to our neighbors’, as that is where the definitive line of demarcation exists. I am not exaggerating when I state that our neighbors’ backyard lawns are lush and green (albeit much smaller than ours) without a single offending weed.

I rounded out my birthday with a trip to Home Depot’s garden center with the kids for a few bags of cedar chunk mulch for the front flower beds, as the hostas and sedums were quickly breaking ground and needed some protection from the still cool May evenings.

With the mulch quickly spread with my helpers, we moved inside for dinner, my favorite birthday cake, and a final quick survey of the backyard lawn from the gazebo. The existing dandelions had closed-up for the evening, revealing an almost purely green lawn to be proud of.

Happy Birthday to me …