I resent that crisp green line

On my painful, hellish run this morning I saw a man in the distance cutting his grass. It had me thinking about our lawn, and how I have to cut the grass because Lee still is unable to walk, and how I wish the lawn would just get miraculously weed-eated and cut. Instead of the reality of ME having to push the lawn mower later today after this exhausting run.....

All this was running through my mind, as I approached the working man. I noticed him pushing the lawnmower along a narrow strip of grass that stretched between his lawn and his neighbor's. But then he did something that shocked me....he stopped....

He stopped about 3 feet short---the 3 feet that fell into his neighbor's property. It would have taken exactly two strides of his feet to complete that strip of grass, practically the exact width of his lawnmower. Instead, he felt the need to leave a very precise, crisp green line between their lawns.

Credit: CAST

And then I started thinking These Yankees up here in North Carolina are so damn strange! I remember my dad cutting this little square of grass that bordered our lawn and our neighbor's driveway. It was just an unspoken rule that whoever was cutting his grass would cut that little square too. Not just cut one side and leave the other 5 inches longer.  What is that!??!?

That's when I turned the corner running toward my house, and I noticed the crisp line between the side of my house and that of my neighbor's.

Right now that I'm close to PAYING cash for someone to cut my grass, that strip of lawn bitterly mocked me. Lee had been pestering me all week to call someone to cut the lawn, but I couldn't seem to bring myself to take out the $50. So of course, I kept putting it off, and I resigned to the fact that I'm going to be cutting it again. It's super long and it's wet because of the non-stop rains that have visited us almost daily for the better part of a week.

And at that moment I remember thinking, I resent Lee's ankle, and I resent my neighbor, and I resent that crisp green line.