Apparently, our friendly neighbors, the church, want to wage war on us and our lawn.
When we first moved in, and I mean that quite literally – we had lived here for less than a month – an elderly gentleman drove up to me as I returned from a job interview on his riding lawnmower and asked if someone had spoken to us about the lawn. I looked at it; the grass had been growing, sure. I smiled at him and said, “oh, well, with the rain the past few days, and our only having a rotary mower, we were waiting for it to dry a bit.”
I showed him our old-fashioned mower (you know, one without a motor), and he seemingly took pity on me.
“Yeah, that would be difficult. Here, I’ll trim it for you this time, then you can finish.”
“That would be great!” I said. “It would save me a lot of work for sure, since this thing isn’t easy to use!”
He rode around our yard, trimmed it, and I spent the next half hour finishing up with the push mower. When Eric got home, I told him that we needed a new mower with a motor, and we went out that weekend and bought one. The lawn has stayed mowed since then.
Now, since we are renting, we haven’t put a lot of money into the yard. We use a broom to sweep excess grass after we mow, and we have only planted seeds that were given to us. We weren’t entirely sure what some of them were, so we dropped them in the little flower beds outside and waited to see what sprang up.
At least two of our plants, though, were dahlias, which Eric’s mom gave us. One died, but the other was starting to flourish! We were looking forward to having its blooms soon.
Then, this afternoon, as we were discussing cleaning the porch tomorrow for my project, we noticed something:
That dirt patch toward the flower boxes, that used to be where our dahlia was. The church “weeded” our garden!
I took a look in our lease because I was furious. There is a yard care bit in there saying that it is our job to maintain the yard – keep the grass short and watered, keep the flower beds nice. Now, maybe there were some weeds mixed in with our flowers – I honestly cannot tell the difference half the time – but they just mowed down our flowers! We had the dahlia, a tobacco plant, bee balm, and a few others. You’ll notice the only thing they left were those in the beds and the hostas that were here when we moved in.
The worst part is that the leasing company might even charge us for the destruction of our own plants! We called them and left a message that our garden was destroyed, and we want to know why.
I am so angry! I don’t want to bother making the porch presentable at this rate. Why should I bother? We are going to be disrespected, so what thought should I put into making this home look nice? I think the church must own the property and rent it through the leasing company, in which case, they are not endearing themselves to us.
I understand that, as renters, we do not have a lot of ground to stand on. But I also know, from management and teaching experience, that when you treat others like no more than dirt, they rarely are willing to work with you.
*sigh*
I am still angry. And I am sad. I’m not the best gardener in the world. The fact that the dahlia was still alive was a big deal to me. Now it’s gone.
😦
You say Polymath like it's a bad thing... 