The Grass Is Greener (Even Though It Probably Shouldn't Be)
Jul 25I live in California. It’s a state with plenty of fantastic attributes, but it has its drawbacks. There are the earthquakes. It’s really crowded. Housing is unpleasantly expensive. And we get droughts. In fact we’ve going through one for the past few years. At this point, there are starting to be more fines and publicity about what we should do to help.
My neighbor is not really having any part of it. He waters his lawn at least 8 times each week (from what I can tell). I know because I’m up early in the morning feeding the baby so I hear both his first and his second watering (which he does at least 4 times each week). He’s also out there watering with a hose in the twilight hours sometimes, just to get those spots that the sprinklers might have missed. As you’d imagine, his lawn is lush and green. It’s nice, it really is. He mows it on average twice a week. He loves his lawn!
We both redid our lawns at the same time a couple of years ago. We originally got the same grass, but after a year or so, he got too fed up with it because it would get brown spots. He didn’t like that. So he killed it and redid it again with different grass. Like I said, he loves his lawn.
Now usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. Except for that whole drought that we’re going through. So while everyone else might be trying to save water, my neighbor has a nice green lawn. To me, it seems pretty wasteful, and I wonder how much water he uses (I’m guessing a lot). Overall it doesn’t make sense for him to do it. It’s more expensive for him, it’s bad for Californians, and it’s not even par for the rest of the neighborhood (nowadays anyway).
So why does he do it? It’s his American dream. It’s where he places his hope, and it’s much more important to him than any of this other stuff. I feel bad for him because it seems like such an ephemeral hope. I really think that there could be more. I sure hope there is anyway!