A good friend has offered to stop by with some tools and fix our lawn. I’m grateful, because then all my other friends will stop complaining about how it looks. Here’s how it looks. What’s wrong? From what I understand, weeds need to be killed. Poor, unsuspecting weeds, that look like all the other green things that grow—but I know my friend will be able to target the ones that are “weeds” and shoot them. Or maybe stab them or poison them.

I’ve never understood the concept of rearranging the dirt that surrounds a house.

Dirt is, well, dirty. And lawns are nothing if not dirty.

Aren’t we always trying to remove dirt from our lives?

We bathe, wash our hair and our clothes, and in some cases even our kitchen floors. We suck up dirt with vacuum cleaners, flush it out of our eyes immediately upon contact, scrape it from under our fingernails, and hope the kids and guests don’t drag in too much of it.

When you say, “I’ve got some dirt on her,” you don’t usually mean you’ve heard she’s won an Edgar or that she’s asked you to be her maid of honor. You mean you’ve got something, well, dirty.

And consider dirt’s synonyms: crud, dreck, dregs, filth, gook, gunk, mire, muck, scuz, sleaze, slime, smudge, smut. Peace, love, and beauty are not among them. You see my point.

Back to the weeds. How can you tell a weed from a plant? Darned if I know, except gardeners and keepers of lawns have it in for weeds. They’re like serial killers of any green things they didn’t plant themselves. We have weed killer, but not fern killer or boxwood killer. What’s up with that?

I’ve seen my neighbor pull up one perfectly good-looking green thing and plant another that looks pretty darn close. I don’t get it. You’ll never catch me weeding. Live and let live, I say.

And did I mention, worms live in lawns? Worms are even worse than dirt because they can follow you around if they choose, like a wormy guy.

Meanwhile, a message to my weeds: Duck! Someone is on the way to kill you. And she’ll bury you in that green container/grave that’s waiting.