Photo by Kyle Joseph Kennedy
My landlord calls to tell me to keep up the house better. I need to get the sticks off the lawn and spray poison on the cracks in the drive like some Cold War pilot dropping Agent Orange. There’s some in the shed, he tells me.
Is this the cost of quaint suburbia? Of streetlights and mediocre schools? I must poison my doorstep? This lawn was once a meadow, the home of the Eastern Elk and an ocean of wildflowers. My landlord would charge admission to the sunset, my complaining neighbor the pockmarked ticket-taker. They may well pull me up by the root, toss me atop a pile of burning leaves. A sacrifice to the God of chemically green golf course lawns. Pluck me up, root and all.
