Spring Colors

It's spring in Our Little Town, and this means that the lawn has emerged from under the snow and turned purple once again.

I have long referred to our lawn as "The Southern Wisconsin Dandelion and Creeping Charlie Preserve," and since it is still a bit early for dandelions to be turning everything yellow or grey this means that the Creeping Charlie has its chance to make the place look like someone lost an Easter egg fight at our house. I rather like this, really. It's bright and colorful, and it gives the place a festive air that almost but not quite makes up for the fact that the green parts of the lawn have reached such non-uniform lengths and densities that I will soon have to break out the mower and chop them all down to size.

And then it will truly no longer be winter.

And then all the springtime chores will no longer be avoidable through the sheer denial of the seasons the way they are now.

This means that eventually I am going to have to break out the hazmat suit and commit acts of chemical warfare that would put the Iraqi Army to shame in order to beat the Creeping Charlie back a bit and see what if any of the green stuff survives. One day I will do this and discover that it was all Weeds and now there is nothing left to Feed. At that point I will pave it and paint it green and purple, with yellow splotches representing dandelions, and my work will be done.

We've also got a tree that needs planting, because a lot that can easily be measured in Smoots clearly needs more trees. Right now we've got anywhere from three to five trees, depending on how you draw the property line and whether you count the little one that we transplanted from the neighbor last fall that has yet to convince us that it is anything more than a carefully-tended stick. But clearly there needs to be more, and to that end the kind folks at Not Bad President Elementary sent Tabitha home with a pine tree the other day.

It's about as long as her arm and wrapped in wet paper and a plastic bag and it has sat on the picnic table outside for the better part of a week now, gasping forlornly at us and trying to shame us into sticking it into the ground so it can grow tall and shed needles and turn the soil acidic so nothing else can grow there. Eventually it will topple over and take out our internet service. And you know this doesn't happen by itself, guys, so we'd better jab this thing into the earth soon.

Finally, there is the annual discussion about the tulips and the daffodils.

Way back when we first moved into this house, Kim and our friend Franz went on a bulb-planting spree in the front lawn. They had about a skadzillion of them, and they decided that they would look best as a random array of color. It must be said that they did look good, though mowing around them has always been a trick.

Apparently these things have a definite lifespan, after which they will not bloom. So every year we discuss whether this is the year to just mow over them or whether I still have to go out there for the first few weeks and look like I'm training for the Lawn Rangers Tactical Drill Team and Exposition Dancers.

Of course it's still April in Wisconsin, so it might just snow again and render all this discussion moot. One can hope.