My conundrum

Another neighbour conundrum for you. Same neighbours in fact. Shocking, I know...

So here's the set up:

Our neighbourhood is in love with their lawns. About 80% tend, fertilize, weed and seed on a regular basis. Makes for a lovely looking street, unless you're part of the 20% that have weeds growing, well, like weeds, at the end of your lawn.

Hi! That's us!

And it's not really just the competitive bitch in me that hates the state of my lawn (although knowing that my lawn does not look like Mr. Fantastico's up the street does annoy me every time Maddie and I walk to the park)... I truly don't like weeds, and do truly care about the state of my lawn. Maybe because I haven't had a lawn in so long to call my own? So, before I get into it, let's not question the sanity of being obsessed with a dark green, lush, weedless lawn - it is what it is, and being questioned on why I even want it, is not going to help the story...

So ... last year we paid a service to do things to our lawn. Like fertilize, and aerate and seed. They were... expensive. And they were... not great. As in, didn't come unless I called to harass them. Spread seed so haphazardly that I'm still (this year) picking grass out of my gardens. Needless to say, we decided that we'd take care of it ourselves for a year and see if we could do better.

We bought weed & feed. We bought on-sale black earth, peat moss and sand - Hubs mixed up his own top soil and seeded the living hell out of the lawn. And we weeded. Oh, we weeded. Using the fancy stand up, take a thousand pounds of turf with your weeds $50 weeder. On my hands and knees using my old hand-shaped-like-a-screwdriver weeder.

We put a lot of hours into (attempting to) making our front lawn healthy again. And after doing all this work, it didn't rain for 2 weeks. Which meant we had to water, and water, and water, and-water-and-water-and-water-and-water. And let the grass grow. Give the seedlings time to take hold, get their grip on the new soil and grow a bit.

Which means we didn't cut our lawn for a few weeks.

Yes, seems like a long time - but really, until we got some rain just last week, it wasn't all that forest-y.

But yes, after the weekend, our grass was crazy. Long and wild. Needing a good haircut. Kind of like Maddie (until yesterday).

You know where this is going, right?

So, picture your typical 'burbs set up... We have a driveway. To the left of the driveway is our front lawn, house, walkway, front step etc. And to the right of our driveway we have a 2 foot-wide strip of lawn that goes up to our backyard gate. And on the other side of this narrow strip of lawn is our neighbour's driveway.

Yes, THAT neighbour.

Again, may I reiterate... we were in perfect knowledge that our lawn needed cutting. Well, to be fair. IIIIII was in perfect knowledge of it. I think the Hubs was using the "we need to let the grass take root" excuse out of mowing the lawn a little far... and when I nagged him on Sunday about doing it he made some kind of mumbled promise that he would take care of it this week.

And you know what? I'm 9 months pregnant. I'm NOT mowing the lawn. This "chore" falls clearly into the Hub's camp of responsibility. Always has. Always will (with a few exceptions of when I thought I'd try my hand at mowing. Guess what? Mowing the lawn is not as fun as it looks. 'Effing shocker.)

So boop-boop-sha-loop, Maddie and I take off on a morning full of errands yesterday morning, and what do we come home to?

A freshly mowed small strip of grass between our driveway and our neighbour's driveway. It was mowed within an inch of it's life (because they have healthy grass/turf/whatever, you see - so they can mow it down to the lowest level and it lives just fine - crappy grass? Ain't like that.). The lawn below the sidewalk and all the way up to just where our driveway starts.

Essentially, the part of the lawn that you'd notice while walking or driving by.

Just to be clear. It's not like she did us the "favour" of mowing the entire strip of lawn on that side of the house. She didn't mow all the way back to our back gate (which you can't really see from the road). NO. Just the VIEWABLE portion. That is also attached to her driveway. BUT IS NOT HER LAWN.

Get where I'm going here?

Enter pregnancy-hormone-induced-RAGE. Coupled with MORTIFICATION that my lawn was so clearly such an embarrasment to her, that she felt that it was in her best interest...nay...The Neighbourhood's best interest that it get cut.

Mortification - coupled with rage? Not a great emotion to wear for the rest of the day.

And I know it's really not a big deal. Something I should just laugh off, because, really? Dude? Who cares that much about their neighbour's lawn? And who has the balls to do this? To actually cut someone else's lawn?

And I want to laugh it off. Truly I do. I want to be the "bigger person" and "find the humour" in the situation and "scoff at the ridiculousness" of it all.

Except I can't. I envision myself going over and picking out some of her stupid pink petunias and seeing just what her reaction would be. And I would respond, "Oh, I just thought I was helping. Making it look better. At least, in my humble opinion of how a garden should look."

And (luckily for her) I haven't seen her as of yet. And yes, I know that it was her, and not him - because I've never seen her douchebag of a husband shovel the driveway OR mow the lawn. I'm not sure he does much of anything outside, except sit in his car and smoke and throw his butts on our lawn.

But when I DO see her? Ohhhh, I'm saying something. At least I'm pretty sure I will. Because it's 24 hours later and I'm still pissy about it. Like raging-Hulk-slashed-with-humiliation-style-of-pissy. And I also don't think that it's something I SHOULDN'T address. Because shouldn't she be aware that indeed, that's not fucking okay to do?

Or am I crazy here? Do I need to reign it in? It's entirely possible that these are pg-hormones and not rationality reacting. But I'm pretty sure I'm right. And before you ask, is it worth it, causing neighbour-strife to be RIGHT?

Yes, yes it is. Because these neighbour's are clearly not coming over for tea anytime soon. I don't think if I burned this bridge, I'd be regretting it at all...

xxoo.S