No one within my nuclear family ever, in my memory of childhood, mowed the lawn or wielded hedge clippers. My antecedents kept ferns and Christmas cactuses, appropriately watered and deadheaded, on the sun porch, but they did not prune the shrubbery. The “yard man” did that.
And so in middle age — as my bank account has evaporated to nothing (me crying, “It’s not my fault! I was born into a family of print journalists just before computer science held a match to the Gutenberg galaxy of print and paper! It’s not my fault!”) and as my socioeconomic status has become uncategorizable (I may be poor, but I’m a first-class snob!) — I realize, belatedly and inconveniently, that I have no “inner resources,” as Dr. Phil might call them, for taking decent care of the grass and the flower beds.
I’m not lazy, mind you. I am and have always been a total mule of a workhorse. I come from a long line of absolute workaholics and late-night-work crammers whose favorite phrase, whether in the office or out on the fishing boat or while riding the fire truck to a five-alarm fire, has been, down the generations — surely to the great annoyance of the co-workers in the office, the fish boat, or the fire truck — “Never mind, I’ll do it myself!”
(And here I break away from the smooth flow of this column’s workhorse narrative with an anecdote about how I got my job at Vogue magazine. This is a windy and ungraceful digression, and if I were editing myself, I’d edit this anecdote straight out of this week’s column, but I’m forging ahead nonetheless. What happened was that in the summer of 1998, when I was a rising young copy editor at Hachette Filipacchi and called in by the human resources department for an interview with Anna Wintour, lo that long century ago, wearing my vintage navy-taffeta slip — “underwear as outwear,” as we called it — and a tiny black cardigan, and with a borrowed Fendi Baguette tucked high up under my armpit, a gesture embodying the late 1990s, and with a borrowed silver Rolex hanging loosely on my wrist — I pitched myself to Anna by making it clear that I understood who I was in the pecking order. I have told this story at dinner parties many times over the years; it’s among the stock of Vogue anecdotes I can still dine out on; and in that way, Vogue has repaid me for my workaholism and loyalty bountifully, in stories if not in money. What I said in July 1998 to Anna Wintour was this: “I know there are show ponies in the Vogue world — show ponies who go out to the runways and parties and represent — and then there are work donkeys. I am a work donkey.” And that is how I was hired and became a work donkey at Vogue. A formidable work donkey, yes, who roamed the corridors of magazine power with a heavy stick clenched in her donkey jaws, but a work donkey nonetheless. The point of this digression being: I am not lazy. Also, the secondary point being: A former Vogue colleague has just recently published her own memoir about magazine-ing, calling her book “Work Horse,” a title that gave me rather a surprise when I saw it reviewed — how high my eyebrows flew! — and as someone who never managed to get a book published, myself, I find this slightly miffing. “Work Donkey” was my anecdote, and “Work Donkey” would have been a better title. I’m just saying.)
Anyway, I’m not a lazy person, but if you have happened to drive past my house on Edwards Lane over the last two or three years you might think a couch potato lived within.
As I keep mentioning — with the alarm in my prose tone rising as the runaway English ivy and the blowsy white snakeroot rise and rise and rise beside my back patio, tangling and obscuring what roses and irises remain — I am incapable of doing much yard work and I have a full acre to contend with. It’s really de trop.
This is similar to what happened to Big and Little Edie Beale at Grey Gardens, by the way. I sympathize with the Beales. I see them. I understand. Not only did the Beales (as I also have a tendency to do) get lost in the flow of time and history, living as much in the past as in the present, they simply had no inner resources to get out into the garden with sharp secateurs and leather rose-gardening gloves and take control of the situation. The yard man did that. Hey, at least the interiors of my house are clean and tidy, unlike the Beales’s. No racoon scat or cat food tins in festering piles chez moi, merci beaucoup (to quote another fellow snob with messy hair, Eloise of the Plaza Hotel).
I’ve been aware of my shortcomings in regard to yard work for a very long time. I was still a freckleface with Pippy Longstocking braids at the East Hampton Middle School when I noticed yard work as a class signifier. It certainly seemed admirable, then as now, that other classes of hard-working people managed to cut their own lawns on the weekends. I saw the dads and grandpas who lived in the neat, pristine, one-story ranch houses that used to line Dayton or the lanes off Newtown on Saturdays and Sundays doing their own hard work. I am seeing in my mind’s eye an Army veteran of the Second World War, who strode out in a Hanes undershirt to keep his shrubs and Kentucky bluegrass shipshape; sometimes his wife, too, with hair tucked under a kerchief, a sleeveless top, and sunglasses hiding her eyes.
Well, finally, this week, into the yard I have ventured. I have no choice: Either I allow my house to become actually and literally engulfed by runaway trumpet vine and English ivy, the shingles pried loose by the mighty and octopus-like tentacles, or I do not. Sigh. I do not. I cannot. I have so many other work tasks and chores to do, but I’m not that lazy.
My plan is to tackle the worst of it in half-hour bouts of great energy, hedge clippers flying, burrs sticking to my fuzzy, inappropriate socks. Last week, I started pulling out the stalks of invasive white snakeroot that turn the flower beds into floating clouds of minuscule white fluff in autumn. Then, on Sunday and Monday of this week, I started attacking the wild blackberry canes, clipping them off and dragging them in rosy-red, prickly piles to the hole in the fence where the deer get in. I’m attempting to kill two birds with one stone by not just in stages removing the blackberry canes but by creating a sort of spiky, nest-trap that will prevent the deer from jumping through.
It’s amateur hour. I know already that my deer trap won’t work. And probably the blackberries will just grow back. Further complicating matters, my brother has suggested that the blackberries along the far side of the lane, abutting the neighbors’ stockade fence, gave good fruit last August. He thinks maybe the blackberry canes need to stay because the eating is good.