People say I’m stubborn about lawncare, but I’m not. I look at every suggestion with an open mind before I say “No.”

The trouble of living in New Jersey is that my lawn decides to die right about September and continues to be yellow and wispy until the following June.

My lawn followed in the footsteps of its ancestors and started yellowing the second Labor Day passed. Maybe earlier.

It was dying as fast as it could, and it made terrific progress. Within a week my lawn looked like someone had spray-painted it in a shade called “expired weeds.”

My brother, the self-avowed brains of the family, suggested we plant some more grass.

I vetoed it with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Boris,” I said (for that is my brother’s name, although in your case it might be David or Chet or His Royal Highness Prince George of Wales) “We cannot simply plant more.”

“Why not?” asked my brother (Boris), ever the intellectual.

“Because it requires one of those fancy machines that spits grass seeds everywhere, and we don’t have one,” I shot back.

I’ve never seen a grass seed up close, but I assume it resembles the seeds in a tomato or a clementine, except it’s bright blue, which brings the suspicion that it’s not organic at all.

All I know is my neighbors allegedly used some a while back, and in September it grew into view in a bright, beautiful shade of… expired weeds. They weren’t even blue expired weeds.

My sister suggested we try to treat our current grass better. Maybe then, she surmised, it would become and stay green and vibrant.

But our grass has enough privileges as it is. It doesn’t get bullied. It gets daily aromatherapy from the rose bushes nearby. It hears birdsong and sees sunrises and sunsets.

That grass lives a better life than I do, yet it has the temerity—if temerity is the word I want—to keel over the moment August ends.

The rose bushes don’t have this problem. One of them even bloomed in December. By the way, December Roses would make a great name for a novel.

Deader-Than-Dead Grass would make a terrible name for a novel, but does the grass look to the rose bushes for inspiration? Of course it doesn’t, the stuck-up little sod.

At last we decided, against our better judgment, to bring out the sprinklers. We hoped against hope that maybe all the grass needed was a little moisturizer—if moisturizer is the word I want. As if it wasn’t privileged enough already.

But instead of becoming a lush emerald carpet, our lawn began to look like a straw mat that one too many people had wiped their boots on.

Chunks of brown appeared among the yellow, as if a giraffe had keeled over right by our front door.

Eventually we left the lawn alone. It had been pampered enough.

See, I’m not stubborn about lawncare. I know that in the contest between man and turf, man is bound to lose.

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Copyright 2026 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.