I hate having a lawn. Lawns don’t make sense to me.

It’s like owning a table you can’t cut things on: it’s just not suited for its purpose, so you spend an inordinate amount of time protecting it.

Where I live, in the spring you have to start mowing the lawn every week. By summer you have to water it to keep it from dying. Then fall rolls around and you have to rake up the leaves or else they’ll smother the grass. And then you hope it’ll survive the winter.

It feels so pointless constantly taking care of something that shouldn’t be there in the first place. If it was meant to be there it would survive without any help.

Funny thing is, I never thought I’d end up with a lawn. When I was younger I decided that home ownership was a scam designed to keep us tied down – and a yard was the extra nail in the coffin. But then I got married, had kids, adopted dogs, and BAM! Home ownership suddenly made sense. And of course a yard made sense, too, because once you’re responsible for other life forms you have to give them somewhere to run around so they don’t destroy the furniture.

My bad attitude about lawns stems from my childhood. My parents bought a house with a yard that was much too big for them to care for so they assigned that task to their three sons. I had weed duty, and I developed a deep hatred for it which never went away. I don’t think I ever understood why I had to spend so much time pulling out plants that could thrive in our environment in order to maintain a lawn that clearly couldn’t. Forgive the awful pun, but I was rooting for the weeds.

Now that I’m a middle-aged guy with a lawn I’ve vowed not to burden my kids with yard work. Yeah, I know – yard work is supposed to build character. But I’d rather do that by forcing them to watch Monty Python clips and subjecting them to my music.

So I attempted to take care of my yard myself, but after a while I gave up and hired someone else to do it. It feels like a waste, but I figure the point of earning a decent living isn’t to buy expensive toys but instead to be able to pay someone to do all the crap you hate to do.

Once the kids are out of the house and the dogs have expired, I’m sure my wife and I will do as so many other empty nesters have done and move to a smaller place with no lawn. I’ve talked with older couples who have done this and it’s pretty clear they do it to escape the yard work.

My only fear is I won’t be able to last that long and will have the yard paved out of exasperation.