While ALMOST Mowing the Lawn

Yesterday evening marked the 6th day in a heat wave that we have been having in the Swamps of Jersey. I believe the high was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I would give you the Celsius measurement but I am at once both too ignorant to know it off the top of my head and too lazy to look it up on a convenient web site.

Blame it on the heat.

Oh but its out there. Growing. Why is that? Why does the grass continue to grow in this heat? Shouldn’t it just want to lay as dormant as I want to? No – grass is a real ‘go getter’. You would think that it would just burn. Wouldn’t that be great?! Oh yeah. I’d love the yard to be dead; brown and dead – dust bowl dead. Yeah, that would be nice.

Man, it’s hot.

I had such high hopes for the ivy (see: http://evilchickenscratch.blogspot.com/2008/06/while-mowing-lawn.html). The plan was simple enough; plant ivy and kill grass. The ivy would spread like a plague covering the tenacious lawn with a lush greenness that would never need to be mowed! That’s a brilliant plan. Oh yes, and the plan would have worked too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

No that’s not right the meddling kids had nothing to do with this one.

“When are you going to come and pick up the bucket of ivy?” my friend from work asked. “It’s starting to stink.”

“Stink?” I asked.

“Yes.” She said. “All you’ll have to do is wash it with bleach.”

“Bleach?”

“Yes. It’s right to the left after you open the gate.

“Right.” I said. “I’ll pick it up.”

And true to my word I did just that. The bucket was exactly where she said it would be and so was the smell. No, that does not do it justice, Gentle Reader. Please forgive me – allow me to rephrase the latter part of that sentence. Here we go…

SO WAS THE SMELL!

Yeah, that’s better. The five-gallon bucket reeked of dead horse intestine stewing in its own juices for about two weeks in the hot sun. I could detect horse feces somehow in the mix. Vultures would have been circling save for the fact that this was supposed to be plant life. No – this really smelled of decaying flesh. The scent of death was about it. It was some abomination of nature warping both animal and plant DNA together in some macabre poached brew plucked from some level of Hell where Satan puts his own black skid marked stained undies. Brutal.

“Bleach!” I said out loud to no one but myself. My friend and her husband were not home so I was officially talking to myself. The simple fact was that there was not enough bleach in my pantry to save what was left of the ‘ivy’. I began to hatch a plan. I couldn’t leave it here. She (my friend) had been kind enough to put the abomination in the bucket for me in the first place and she had made a request for me to pick it up from her residence – a job that I had agreed to do. There was no way that I could take it all the way to my place. I had to find a home for it… nearby. And that’s exactly what I did. I dumped out a little of the concoction so that it wouldn’t spill in the bed of my small SUV.

…Oh the stench…

I put the bucket in my trunk and drove to the woods where I introduced ‘ivy’ to the local environment. I didn’t litter – that would have been wrong. Instead I stimulated the ecosphere and reforested a bare patch in the forest.

Hideous.

I thanked my friend for her troubles, deodorized my truck and silently wished that the initial plan had come to fruition. Ah, “the best laid plans of mice and men”; this was a good one too. Now instead of ivy I’ve got a lawn full of tall, hot grass that needs mowing. Oh well, what’s a boy to do?

Maybe I’ll ask my friend for another bucket sans the horse intestine. Hey (or hay), it could work.