Saturday mornings should be the mother’s hug of each week. Saturday mornings were designed for sleeping late then reading a good book in bed while slowly draining a pot of freshly brewed coffee.
Saturday mornings should be filled with jazz music and NPR, ham and cheese omelets, and a stubborn reluctance to change out of the clothing you wore to bed.
Saturday mornings should not be soiled—pun intended here—by the odious threat of yard work.
So, Dear Reader, you can only imagine the melancholy that swallowed me when I noticed my wife putting on leggings and sneakers on Saturday morning—Dave Brubek Day, nonetheless—while I was reading a Richard Russo novel in bed with Buster, our pug, snoozing by my feet.
“What are you doing?” I asked my wife, sitting up to take a sip of coffee and scratch Buster’s belly with my big toe.
“We are doing yard work today, dear. Remember?”
My stomach sunk as I remembered. I remembered committing to rake the stupid refuse in our stupid yard and pack it in the stupid lawn bags then mow the stupid lawn. I remembered agreeing to help sweep our stupid patio and pull the stupid weeds growing in the stupid cracks between the stupid bricks.
Oh yes, I remembered, and I wanted to cry.
Goodnight, glorious Saturday morning. Goodnight, coffee. Goodnight, Richard Russo. Goodnight, NPR and Dave Brubek. Goodnight, ham and cheese omelet and the clothing I wore to bed.
So I stood and dressed and went outside. I grabbed a stupid rake and started the stupid yard work, suffering outrageous blisters on my hands from the process.
At one point, while raking the stupid lawn—that had been ravaged by the recent Nor’easter that took down small trees and scattered stupid branches and stupid pine cones everywhere, I started thinking about Karl Marx and how he would feel about yard work.
We have a large lawn, much larger yard than any individuals need to possess. But our lawn, in comparison to our neighbors—who are “lawn people,” cultivating finely sculpted and munched front yards—is a paltry thing, uncouth and defiant.
But who really needs to own this much property anyway? Who needs these ostentatious displays of possession to define their status in society? Our worth is determined by our landscape. Here we are with all of this land entitled to us by some legal deed we purchased from the previous “owners” through financial transactions involving imaginary money.
How absurd.
And there I was, raking this large lawn while somewhere across the globe three generations of a family in India share an apartment the size of a bathroom. How can any person of conscience reconcile such inequity in the distribution of land?
Then as I continued raking, I realized that I wasn’t all that concerned about geopolitical issues, or equity, or Karl Marx. I was just another selfish American man pissed about having to do yard work.
“Have you ever thought about yard work through a Marxist lens?” I called to my wife as storm clouds approached, and I prayed for them to make it to us. Goodnight, Sun.
“Stop being such a bitch,” she called to me, kneeling in her flowerbed. “It’s not like you’re in a Gulag.”