Our Garden Savanna

When the delivery guy brought that package up to the front door, he didn't realize I was watching him through the front window. He eyed our front yard warily, no doubt searching for the path to the door. Not seeing it, or perhaps not seeing me, he brazenly tromped across the grass to the front door.

I had been having a bad day, and to be honest, had already snapped at several telephone marketers and Husband, whom I had misidentified as a telemarketer. When the guy left, I started imagining revenge scenarios involving the shamefully unmown quality of our lawn.

There must be a tiny jungle ecosystem in development out there in our long grasses. Possibly, a tiny version of the Cretaceous is thriving, with feisty little velociraptors, and maybe a tyrannosaurus or two. These tiny voracious beasts must have torn ruthlessly at the alarmed delivery man's trousers, even as his shoes got caught up in the long grassy vines. By the time he got to the car, scraps of his shoes were barely clinging to his feet, and the bottom two inches of his pants were torn to ribbons, like the It's man's from Monty Python.

I think next time he will take the path of civilization.

But all this makes me think twice about ever mowing the lawn. Do I need to subject an entire ecosystem to trauma and death just so my neighbours will stop using the Lawn Comparison Index to feel superior? Perhaps it must be done, and the resulting extinction event will herald a new age of creatures whose necks will escape the onslaught from my mower.