Spring here, the grass is... still yellow

April 2010

Crazy grass here. It goes dormant. These are special varieties of grasses here in the south designed (genetically engineered?) to withstand the heat of summer. The tradeoff is that they are ugly and yellow all winter and well into the spring. And it is well into spring. Actually, feels like summer to a Canadian. This is good enough, no need to get any hotter. And despite a good couple of weeks of this sunshine and warm temperatures, the grass is still yellow. Not our grass of couse. That's because our lawn is all weeds. Lovely, lush, green weeds. It is the only way to go. It is all about the colour. Not that we have anything to do with it. Our landlord has hired some 'lawn care specialists', and I use the term loosely, who come whenever the spirit moves them to hack down our weed lawn and attack the jungle out back. Mostly what they do is use leafblowers to fire all the trimmings and crap into the neighbours hedge.

We are an embarrassment on our street, actually- our street of lovely homes (not rentals like ours) and well maintained manicured lawns. I think they use an overseeding of other grasses because many of them are actually green now, or at least greenish, and crucially they are all grass. Not a weed to be found.

Other signs of spring have yet to come. The hummingbirds are not here, nor are the fireflies. But the crickets have begun to sing at night. Not the thundering roar of summer but they make their presence known. Also making an appearance are the gigantic carpenter bees.

And the possum road-kill is back. I had to negotiatiate a hard left followed by a hard right ('the dead possum two-step') to avoid two of them down on Old Briarcliff Road, my route to pick up the girls. One was right in the middle of the road, lying on his side. I hate that. Just looked like he was having a nap. I dread seeing his progressively mangled body.

It reminds me of last summers 'Mr Possum' on (new) Briarcliff Road. This one is a really busy street compared to the wind through the forest that is Old Briarcliff. Anyway, this little guy met his end on Briarcliff in the 'valley of the jungle', an area just before the supermarket. There is a river below a bridge and an expanse of forest that looks very wild and exotic. There are vines and dense vegetation. He must have lived in there and decided to cross the road fo some reason. At first, before I knew about possums or opposums as they are actually known, I liked to think he was a mongoose. 'Mr Mongoose', I imagined, had lived in that jungle carrying out the noble quest of killing snakes. But after a visit to to the natural history museum and a funny story from my little girl, I realized Mr. Mongoose was in fact, a possum. Georgie had excitedly told me that her music teacher, Mr Randy, had had a possum appear in his kitchen one night. He had crawled in through a hole in the floor under his refridgerator. We also had one in our backyard and he attacked the dog from downstairs. Anyway the original Mr. Possum ended up dead on the side of the road out of harms way. Well, he was out of the way of further desecration by cars. That's what I hate about roadkill. Sure there is the whole petrifiying flesh thing, and the tragic waste of precious life so that someone can go to the store to get ice cream. But the real killer is the indignity of the continued abuse of the body. The smushing, the crushing, the slicing, the dicing. Enough already. There was, of course, no clean up crew and I passed him every day as he shrank and stank, and oozed, and then eventually dried up in the stifling heat. Over time he became a flat little patch of fur, and then almost like a stain. Then the monsoon of September came and he was gone.

But now the season has begun again and the poor little possums are in for it. For this is a town of cars and bad drivers and of forests and little critters who just can't seem to stay off the road.