My brother just bought a house. Yes, despite everyone’s fears, it is possible, even in today’s economy and with one parent in kollel, to scrimp and save and finally find an actual affordable house, which, thanks to today’s housing market, is not really bigger than his basement apartment. His apartment has three bedrooms, depending on your definition of a bedroom. The house, meanwhile, is advertised as four bedrooms, but that’s because the people who lived there before him did not see the need for a dining room. (Non-Jews dine like once a year. The rest of the year they just eat.) The only thing he’s gaining I think is a yard. And a basement, but he has a basement.
But he’s getting a big yard! And that’s exciting. That’s the dream—“I want to own a house with a yard.” Everyone says that. The yard is almost as important as the house. Grass is pretty, and it’s something that—although it is technically your property—you don’t have to clean it all the time. The dirt is supposed to be there.
Also, grass produces a lot of oxygen so that when you open your windows, you get some fresh air. People with no grass open their windows and they just get noise. Though not the noise of their neighbors mowing their lawns.
Neighbors mowing their lawns are annoying, because it’s an extended audible reminder to your spouse that you guys should be mowing your lawn. Especially when you have non-Jewish neighbors, who in your opinion work on their lawns way too often, using all the time they save by not dining.
Having a yard is actually a lot of work. For one thing, grass doesn’t stay small. It wants to grow, though Hashem only knows into what. We can never find out, or we get a ticket. There are no other plants that it’s okay to have, but if you let it grow all the way, you get in trouble with the law.
And some people, such as your neighbors on both sides, water their lawns too, so it could grow faster, so they can cut it again. All day long, they’re either cutting their grass or watering their lawn. It’s like a never-ending project with them, just to get out of the house. “I got to go out and water the lawn again!”
Yes, whatever they’re growing is maybe nicer than whatever you’re growing. But in the end, they’re both green, and green is what you’re going for. Your crabgrass and weeds are producing just as much oxygen as their grass. More, probably, because their grass is underwater. But theirs is a deeper green. And that makes your property look bad, so now you have to get out and do something. Because, as it turns out, about 75% of lawn maintenance is just about getting yours to look okay compared to the others on your block. You can’t all get together and say, “No one’s going to water their lawns, and everyone will just think that’s how grass grows over here”?
And then when you’re done with all of that, there’s a whole backyard. Which no one even sees or compares to your neighbors. We have fences on 3 sides of our backyard, none of which belong to us. The way we know they don’t belong to us is that they don’t match each other. So how nice is our mowed and watered backyard going to look with 3 mismatched fences? Not to mention whatever our chickens are doing back there.
Yet you have to maintain your backyard, because that’s where you let your kids play. So the grass can’t be that long. Whether or not you cut your backyard might be your secret, but if you have tall grass, you get snakes, and then your kids go play out there and come into the house with snakes, and you have to keep those snakes in a fish bowl and try to figure out how to feed them until they starve to death, which takes a really long time with snakes.
“Is it getting skinnier? I can’t tell.”
And what kind of wildlife you get usually depends on the size of your property. The general rule is that the bigger the property, the bigger the wildlife is going to be. We are not at a level of bears and deer, but we are at the level that we’ve had a raccoon attempt to carry off our garbage can. Until he realized he couldn’t toss it over the fence.
Not that whatever we have isn’t scary when we run into it unexpectedly in the dark.
Sure, there are ways to deal. If I have to go out the back at night, I usually knock on the back door, or I open and close the door really quickly and then wait a minute for whatever might be out there to gather its things and leave. There’s a certain terror in taking out the garbage after dark when you don’t know if you’re going to run into something face to face and neither of you will be sure what to do next. Chances are you’re going to throw the garbage bag vaguely in the direction of the cans as an appeasement offering, while running in the opposite direction. And then the next morning your wife will say, “Why is there garbage all over our driveway?” And you’ll say, “I don’t know; raccoons.”
You also have to clean behind your bushes. If you have a lawn, you are legally required to have a row of bushes up against the front of your house. You can’t just have grass growing up to the house; that’s weird. It’s the first thing people will notice.
And that’s how you get poison ivy.
Well, that’s how I got poison ivy. I don’t know how you get poison ivy.
I was behind the bushes the other day, pulling out vines from the bottom that were growing up through the bushes, and I picked up this one smallish vine that, in retaliation, slapped me in the face. At which point I looked at it and thought, “Hey, maybe this is poison ivy.”
I don’t actually know what poison ivy looks like. I grew up in Monsey and have never gotten poison ivy, to my knowledge. (Maybe without my knowledge?) But this was the Nine Days, so statistically, if you’re not sure if you touched poison ivy, you definitely did.
So my first reaction was, while touching it only with the one hand that had already touched it, I threw it in the street, just in case. I was not going to stuff it into the bag with all the other vines and grass clippings so I could keep touching it.
And then what? The last thing I was going to do when I thought I might have poison ivy on my hands was sit down at my computer keyboard and look up what to do about poison ivy. The second to last thing I wanted to do was take a shower, touching all my clothes and doorknobs on the way there. And then I can’t do laundry for Nine Days.
So I grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer, which I still have out because of the chickens, and I rubbed it all over my arm and my face. And everything seemed okay for 3 days afterward, which is apparently when poison ivy kicks in, when I noticed some itchy bug bites that were shaped like lines. That I looked up, and it turns out there are no bug bites that are shaped like lines. A bug bite is a dot and the space equidistant around it. That’s why it’s round. What would a bug have to be doing to make a line? Is he sliding down your skin on his stinger?
Also, the places that I had these marks were all on the same side of my body, which is another thing that bugs don’t really concern themselves with. They were where my arm meets my sleeve, where my cheek meets my facial hair, and where my wrist meets my watch—all places that a person standing on the front lawn giving himself a hobo bath with hand sanitizer would likely not hit that thoroughly.
What’s crazy is that no matter what else you have growing on your personal property, there will also be poison ivy. There’s no other plant that grows everywhere. That’s so strange. In fact, I read somewhere that poison ivy is part of the cashew family, but no one says to people who are allergic to nuts, “Be careful! You could be accidentally growing cashews!”
So I looked up how I was supposed to get rid of this, in case it happens again. Apparently, first of all, you’re supposed to wear gloves. That’s great. I didn’t see it coming, and it hit my entire arm and the side of my face.
The main techniques that I found said to either:
1. Put it in a plastic bag, which first of all, how am I finding a plastic bag long and skinny enough? Should I be keeping those bags that the lulav comes in?
2. Bury it. Bury it? How is that not replanting it? Should I dig six feet?
It also said that whatever you do, do not burn it, because then you’re just giving the whole neighborhood poison ivy.
I should tell my brother, so he knows. n
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.