I’m a Suburban Farmer of Nothing

Today I took the day off from work to tend to the house. Between the kids’ sports and a host of other activities, there’s simply no time on the weekend for us to get to everything that needs to get done. Work was pretty quiet this week, so today seemed like the right day to knock some stuff out. I’m not sure why I bothered.

By 9AM I had cleaned the house twice. Once before the kids came downstairs and once after they left for school. I have no doubt it will need to be cleaned twice again tonight. After they left, I rolled up my sleeves and laid down some soil to fill in some of the holes in our yard. Bullet, our dog, likes to mine certain areas of our lawn, leaving little sinkholes for us to trip our feet in. Once the holes were plugged, I seeded them and ran the sprinkler to soak them all up. I did this knowing full well that this was a fruitless effort. By this afternoon, Bullet will have dug up most of what I laid down, and then continue his efforts to build out a trench behind the front fence. It’s wonderful.

We also have some bunnies. Why? Because raising useless animals is the way of the suburban farmer. Now I have a whole area outside of my house that smells like a barn, serving two animals that don’t do anything but stink up the place. What do I get for owning Elmer and Bugs? No eggs. No bacon. No horse to carry me around. Instead I get to muck out bunny stalls once a week, yielding all sorts of aromas I never want to experience again. After years of saying “no” to getting bunnies because I knew this was how it was all going to play out, covid made me fold, and now here I am — a literal shoveler of shit.

Following some bunny maintenance, I returned to my yard work. First I cut back the poison sumac growing over the forsythia. Then I trimmed the branches from the maple that were falling low to the ground. After that I swept up some of last year’s leaves that blew over from the neighbor’s lawn. All was going pretty well until I walked straight into a landmine, courtesy you know who. Bullet had thoughtfully placed a couple of gorilla fingers right where one has to stand in order to access the sprinkler system panel. I love my life, I love my life, I love my life.

But I’d almost rather step in dogshit than mow the lawn. There is nothing on my farm that I find so mundane, so arbitrary, and so soul-leeching, as mowing the lawn. Going round and round, cutting our grass’s hair, I can’t help but feel like God is watching me with one eyebrow raised. I always envision him getting together with his buddies, grabbing a beer, and laughing about how Matt is totally wasting his life. It’s the only time I envision him this way. Sometimes he’s not a male. Most times he’s not even human-like, but rather a wisp of wind, or something other-worldly. But whenever I’m mowing the lawn, God turns into Bill Brasky entertaining the village idiots, mocking my lonely labors.

Come to think of it, why am I doing so much of this yardwork alone? Wasn’t the whole point of having kids to get more farmhands? I know we’re not farming anything, but I thought I’d at least get some free labor out of this fatherhood deal. A couple hundred years ago we would have had our kids tilling the ground before they were out of diapers. Now we spend a fortune on them so that they can play games for sixteen years, before rewarding them further with a car. How did we screw this up so badly? Is there a child union I’m unaware of? Who was the brain trust that said “you know what? We are doing such a disservice to our children that we need to flip this thing on its head and crush the ever-living shit out of the parents.”

Why do we go on this way, tending fields that produce nothing but accommodations for our vanity? Or are we just clearing out space to help keep our collective thoughts organized? Maybe we do it because we truly want to create a little slice of beauty for ourselves. Or maybe we really do just want to give our children a pretty place to grow up. After all, loving our kids is really the only thing we can ever be sure of. Yes, even the ones that don’t want to work. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no real thought behind any of it. Maybe we’re just looking to kill some time while our truck is in the shop. That reminds me.