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Roger Rabbits with |
“Whatcha looking at?” she asked. I was on the street staring down at a smidgeon of grass, a little bit of berm. Now she was staring at the same bit of grass, but not seeing what I was seeing.
“What I am looking at…” I harrumphed. “…is the worst of humanity. Miserableness, mean-spiritedness, selfishness. And you will sense, I am not liking what I am seeing.”
“Gosh,” she mused. “All I can see is fine fescue which is often blended with other grasses to form an attractive, deep green, fine textured turf.”
Spare me please! But she blathered on. “I do like a nice lawn. King Charles has lovely lawns at Sandringham. Like carpets.”
“Ma’am, I don’t mean to mess with your day but I am confronting ugliness personified. And you are lecturing me on the differences between cocksfoot, carex and kikuyu.”
“Did you know…” she continued. She was a talker, not a listener. “…mowing lawns removes clippings which contain essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium so regular fertilisation is crucial to…”
“Ma’am…I don’t have time nor space for agrostology lessons. I am trying to cobble together a yarn for Page 2, I’m 150 words into a script, one-quarter of the required word count, and I haven’t yet made my point. Any point really.”
So, to that point.
A nicety
Someone had mowed this berm in the inner “burbs” – mowed it to a nicety. Trimmed the edges. Trimmed to a nicety. Everything neat as a pin. But not all was as it seemed.
Because they had mowed so far down the berm and stopped, about 1.5 metres short of the neighbour’s drive. And they had trimmed the edges to same point and stopped. A patch of about 3m2 remained unmown, untrimmed, unmanicured. The tell-tale demarcation line where the mowing had stopped, lined up perfectly with the boundary fence. The mower had obviously decided that little bit of lawn was not their responsibility so it would stay unmown.
How petty! How spiteful! Where’s the neighbourliness, the friendliness, warmth and kindness. Where’s the goodwill?
That 3m2 of growth that hadn’t been tended or manicured made a mockery of the big bit that had. All the tidiness, and property pride was undone by the mean-spiritedness of a demarcation line. A sort of green grassy Berlin Wall, a line that divided, a line that screamed: “We don’t care about you!” A sad statement.
More than unmown grass
“Mmm,” says my new agrostologist friend. “At best, petty! But it’s more than unmown grass, isn’t it? It’s a very public demonstration of someone’s disregard for you. They just don’t care – about you or the appearance of the neighbourhood.”
But it could also be a contractor who can’t make a living doing freebies. Or it could be someone who simply doesn’t want their berm mowed.
Because Auckland Transport – that Auckland infrastructure behemoth, charged with everything including berms – suggests it can be rude to mow a someone’s berm without asking first. Intentions may be good but mowing arbitrarily can be construed as intrusive or presumptuous. Really? Perhaps the mower just wants to keep the neighbourhood tidy, or do someone a favour.
All over town…
It’s interesting that when you first spot berm demarcation you suddenly start seeing it all over town. Petty! Petty people obsessing about the small, unimportant things, and being unnecessarily unkind.
But berm maintenance can excite people – even move them to bad language.
Here’s some online berm traffic:
“There’s a berm near us that would feed a family of goats. Bugger that.”
“I mow my neighbour’s berm but they don’t reciprocate because mine’s a bit bigger. FFS” – in the context of this story a truncation of “For Fescue’s Sake” I suspect.
“My neighbour leaves a half-metre strip next to my letterbox when he mows [expletive] pathetic!”
“I mowed my neighbour’s berm and he got pissy because I scalped it. Never again.”
Then from stage left, enter the “Two-stroke samaritan”.
“It wasn’t uncommon to see my Dad mowing the berm four or five properties up the road. As a kid I cringed, now I see how generous he was.”
‘My contribution’
I had a neighbour who lived next to an elderly couple. There were no fences so when he mowed his lawns most weekends he just continued seamlessly into the neighbour’s property. A little time, a little effort repaid with buckets of gratitude and smiles.
Another bloke took it on himself to be conservator of neighbourhood berms – starting on his and finishing five properties up the street. “My contribution,” he would say. Two recipients of that goodwill would occasionally mow their own berms, but just their own. Nice.
Sometimes goodwill can be taken advantage of. Another householder would shamelessly dump grass clippings from lawns inside their property under a plane tree on the same berm.
He knew his problem, his crap, would be selflessly taken care of by the “Two-stroke samaritan”. Two-stroke would just shrug, wouldn’t let Mr Self-centred take away from his “contribution”, his enjoyment.
There’s also “Super-Samaritan” in the US, who scouts neighbourhoods for over-grown, uncared for properties and people in need. Then he cracks into it. For nothing. He doesn’t leave any bit of the berm untended.