I hate borders.

Not, like, U.S. borders. Being in New Jersey, I don’t really see those.

Between the chemical smog and the rubbish heaps we call tourist attractions, it’s a wonder I see anything at all.

I mean I have a special hatred for lawn borders. I can never get mine to look straight.

Since I live in the heart of vanilla suburbia, when my lawn’s edges are crooked, I’m not considered part of the community. Or humanity. I’m not even invited to the Halloween parade.

Fortunately for the borderly challenged and borderline insane among us — or maybe it’s the other way around — the lawn care industry has some solutions.

One day, someone, somewhere, got the bright idea of putting a bunch of spinning blades on a stick and calling it a weed whacker.

I would not be surprised if, like many pesticides, it started out as a war weapon.

It’s wondrous what a weed whacker whacks is not wholly weedy.

You can use one of those suckers to put a good solid line between your grass and the start of the sidewalk.

Yeah, it can trim weeds. But it can also trim dirt. And if you really crank it up, you can cleave through solid rocks with it.

Or you can whack it into the side of your gardening boot, shave off an inch of reinforced rubber — enough to see that you’re not wearing your lucky socks — and decide to never ever touch that spinning wheel of death again.

I also considered using a gardening shovel. Then I ceased to consider it, for obvious reasons.

Primary among them was I was not about to crawl on my hands and knees for 127 hours to straighten the edge of my lawn.

Secondary among them was I couldn’t convince my neighbor’s kids to do it, even when I offered more than minimum wage.

They didn’t even consider it when I offered them my regular salary. They just laughed.

I wish I could throw a shovel at my boss, but that wouldn’t get me a raise. It’d just lose me a shovel.

Eh, whatever. It’s not a good shovel, anyway.

The last tool in my garage that looked like it could possibly be up to the challenge of straightening my lawn’s edges was called… a lawn edger.

Only it wasn’t in my garage.

It was in my neighbor’s garage, because that horrible human being — I mean, that splendid, good-tempered man — had borrowed it three months before and never given it back.

Maybe I should have asked for it back after a few days. Or a week. Or a month. Before he got the impression that he owned it.

But I have a very good reason for not demanding my lawn edger back.

Despite being a splendid, good-tempered man, my neighbor owns a weed whacker.

And I am never ever going to approach anyone who has a bunch of spinning blades on a stick and suggest the bland, pleasant, totally uncontroversial topic of property ownership.

That leaves me with one solution to my border problem.

Hire a lawn care service? Ha! I don’t have the salary for that.

It’s back to using a gardening shovel for me.

Good thing I haven’t thrown it at anyone. Yet.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.