Pompous Grass

When I traded my home and 80 acres in the country for a subdivision inside the city limit, I saw no need to keep my tractor. Of course my wife didn’t think that was the best of ideas, but I was really kind of tired of trying to keep it running anyway. I don’t know the exact acreage of my current yard, but the little push mower I owned seemed to be adequate to preen what little lawn I was now charged with maintaining. I must have forgotten what dragging around a lawnmower in 100 degree heat really feels like!

One of the best ways to combat the pain of outdoor work in this type of heat is to only work early in the morning and late evening. Unless you are retired, or independently wealthy, this leaves the evening as the only option for weekday maintenance. Get off work, eat supper, drink a couple of beers, and see if you can have a heart attack before bedtime! Wait a minute…it sounds like I’m complaining about summertime. I’m better now; I just slapped myself.

I thought of one such summer evening this morning as I read a friend’s Facebook post about a battle waged with a clump of Pampas Grass. It was probably my second season in the new house, and I was doing my best to finish cutting the scorched summer grass with what little daylight remained. The main part of the yard was done and I was trimming the little strip that touches the street. After pushing the mower all the way to my neighbor’s mailbox, I turned to drag the screaming beast in the opposite direction. If the heat was stressing my heart, what I turned to face almost stopped it! Every one of those awful English horror movies I watched as kid had just come true; I was locked in a death gaze with Count Dracula!

Okay, it wasn’t an actual vampire, but my heart was a little slower at figuring this out than my head was. This stoic demon I faced was actually my dark-headed, dark featured Romanian neighbor that I really didn’t know very well. The fact that he was offering the use of his “sit-down” mower calmed my nerves a touch, but I was still shaken as I relayed the evening’s events to my wife and daughter. Of course they thought this was pretty funny, and once I sat down and stopped stripping cloves of the garlic bunch, I enjoyed a pretty good laugh at myself as well. I knew what his real name was, but from that day forward he was referred to (in private of course) as Boris.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I’m sitting on his back deck having a taste of his favorite scotch. His English is not perfect, but after a couple of drinks we seem to understand each other pretty well. But alcohol also has a way of relaxing the tongue and after I slipped the first time and called him Boris (he didn’t notice) I decided to just pack up and go home before I did it again. I walked through the dark mumbling his real name over and over; doing my best to bring the truth to the forefront!

That was a long story to explain my grandmother’s love of pompous grass! But what I do know is that she knew (at some point anyway) what the real name of this plant was. But she had used her pet name for so long I doubt that she remembered anymore. Her name for this plant was so etched in what she knew that I feel sure it sounded funny to say the correct name. If you say, or think… or hate something for a long enough period of time it becomes the truth.