Little Yard of Horrors

I have a weird relationship with gardening: I really want to love it, but I also really want to smack it in the face and make it cry. I think our Chris Brown/Rihanna relationship stems from my rather overblown romantic notion of what gardening is. I prefer to think of gardening as a bright, fresh morning, the night's dew sparkling on my tomatoes and zucchini before it melts away under the hot summer sun. Before the sun is out in full force to wreak havoc upon the friendly dewdrops, I emerge from my house, my hair loosely braided, and clad in all-natural fibers--you know, something appropriately bohemian but also consciously fashionable, like a J. Crew sheer cotton button-down. I have some sort of fair-trade wicker basket in my hand (organically sourced and hand-woven, natch) and an exceptionally cute, sustainable straw hat on my head, maybe with a bow. I mean, hey! This gardening stuff? It's hard work, people! I need the right gear.

As I wander from my house, completely one with nature and in full communion with Mother Earth, who is coming over later for tea and gossip, I stop at the various plots of fertile soil in my garden, from which have emerged a veritable Thanksgiving cornucopia: shiny tomatoes about to burst, fat blackberries practically jumping off the vine, and cucumbers bigger than Jon Gosselin's ego (EGO. I said EGO, perverts!). I pick anything and everything I desire, filling my lovely, sustainable basket to the brim, and then meander back into the house, where I make blackberry teacakes for my date with Mother Earth.

Yeah.

You know what gardening is REALLY about? Gardening is DIRT. And BUGS. And digging up the long-dead housepets of the prior owner of your eighty-year-old house, and wondering if that discovery falls into the category of "grave robbery" or "clinical exhumation." Ultimately, I realized that, unfortunately, bugs are inherent to any outdoor adventure, and that any exploits that involve Lawyer Boy and I debating whether the subject was once named Fluffy or Pookiss is not in any way a "clinical" exercise.

We have spent the better part of the last six months trying to wrestle our front and back yards free from the terrifying grip of ivy, kudzu, and what I have been told is grass, but what I patently refuse to believe is grass. Frankly, it is too friendly and loving to be grass. It grows quickly, and so long and free that we sit in the sun together, the "grass" and I, braiding each others' locks and giggling about boys we want to talk to us. I've never met grass so eager to please, but LB burst my love bubble by telling me that it's not the grass, it's me. The love that it gives as freely as a middle-schooler with a crush is not because it really wants me; it's because I refuse to break up with it. Put simply, the grass wouldn't be all up in my biznass if I would remember to cut it more frequently than once a month.

So instead of a Garden of Eden of delectable, desirable vegetables, I am faced with acres of ivy and slutty grass that wants only to wind itself provocatively around my ankles. Anything that is supposed to grow, anything that is planted on purpose, dies as soon as I glance at it, killing my dreams of sustainable baskets and beribboned straw hats. I possess the mythical kiss of death. I only wish I'd known that when I was dating; I could really have used that power to weed out the losers earlier in the game.

However, Lawyer Boy is quite the Prince of the Pea Pod over here, raking and hoeing Fluffy's graveyard into producing some serious farmer's market goods. He has grown whole plants from seeds, which I find beyond impressive, since I cannot grow plants from plants. In just a few months, the kudzu has been bitchslapped, the ivy sent to boot camp, and the overgrown grass taught to shape up and keep its pants on. He is a true Green Giant to my Blackbeard.

Not that I, you know, have a beard. But if I did, I would totally braid a ribbon into it before wandering out into the garden, so that it coordinated with my sustainable straw hat.