What I heard: Lawn Order

Podcast: 99% Invisible, Episode 177

We had our first rain two days ago. Woke me up, content, at 4 in the morning. The hard, dusty, humid-then-dry-then-humid-again Israeli summer is nearing its end, and we can once again rejoice in the sound of rain.

My first thought is about my car — and how I this will buy me buy a few more days (weeks?) until I Absolutely Must Take the Car To Wash. But this is replaced by my second thought: our backyard, and how I can officially stop watering the lawn four times a week.

Scandalous! Fifteen minutes a day, four times a week. I look at my lawn — not manicured, not huge, not perfect — but green. That’s the price, in drops, and shekels, that we have to pay. We’ve made it in life.

I remember a recent episode of 99% Invisible, which opens with a man in Texas being arrested (arrested!) for not keeping his lawn up to community standards. Lawn police. Neighbors and norms. Social conformity. Volunteers who help out.

But he still spent a night in jail!

The same episode ends with equally amusing social inventions, like California’s attempt to brand brown as the new green , and, of course the new business of painting lawns green (“with all-natural ingredients.”)

What stuck with me was this: the artificial nature of lawns. They don’t exist in nature — just in British idealizations of Italian landscapes, the golf courses of the rich, and the suburbs of middle classes everywhere.

We mow and water and fertilize the grass to keep it perennially green, of a certain height. These are living organisms that cannot grow, cannot reproduce, and cannot die. Artificial.

Back to reality, to our desert climate houses with solar-panel water heaters and compost trash bins. Yes, we have lawns, but don’t we also take precious minutes to hang our laundry to dry instead of shoving it in the dryer?

The laundry. Damn. It must be now be soaked.