Owning a house is hard work. Actually, owning the house is pretty easy- you just write a check to the bank every month and occasionally moan to whoever will listen about your property taxes. Anyone can do that. It's MAINTAINING the house that's hard. Okay, correction. It's not the maintenance that we're struggling with, because we never seem to get to the actual point of doing any work, but the THINKING about the MAINTENANCE- well, that's positively draining.

Let's talk about my lawn for a second. The phrase "growing like a weed" doesn't make any sense until you have a yard that you notice only, say, once a week. My lawn and I are in that level of our relationship where we're somewhere between "perfect strangers" and "barely on speaking terms." Sometimes I glance over it while I'm pulling in or out of my driveway. Sometimes I do this and I think, "Someone should really do something about all that." But, most of the time, I'm too focused on getting out of or into the house that our lawn could be covered with trillion dollar bills and I'd walk right past it. While complaining about my property taxes.

This week, though, I happened to notice the lawn one day and was overtaken with a wild panic. Suddenly, my lawn had become like a neglected child that DCFS could come over and claim. Could my lawn be placed into protective custody? Be placed next to a better home with caring, thoughtful homeowners who would take time out of their action-packed, couch-laden evenings to actually mow the damn thing or pull out some - not even all, just some- of the weeds? Would I have visitation with my lawn? And, if they did grant visitation, would I ever actually go visit it? Of course I wouldn't. It's just a lawn, and one that I don't even care about that much.

It's disgusting, though, to think that our lawn may be the shame of the neighborhood. I always counted on having an unkempt lawn, because I knew landscaping could never possibly be a priority in my already rich and full life. But, I thought for sure that someone in the neighborhood, anywhere in the neighborhood, would have a worse lawn than us. To be fair, I haven't walked around the entire neighborhood, because I am pretty lazy. But, judging from what I've seen from my car, when I've bothered to look, everyone else has a neat and manicured lawn. Everyone cares, but us.

But, like I've said, it's hard work thinking about maintaining things. Hard work imagining mowing the lawn and yanking the weeds. It's exhausting, and nobody told me it would be this exhausting, and that's why I'm going straight for the couch when I get home, to unwind.