River and the Brown Grass

My parents are obsessed with their yard.  Every inch is well-manicured with carefully selected flowers blooming in their five gardens.  They try to keep their lawn free of weeds, which is difficult because their careless neighbors on either side have more weeds than grass. If you flew a drone over our house, you could see where one lawn ends and the others begin.  Our lawn is a bright green, and our neighbor’s yard a dull yellow. My parents spread chemicals on the lawn four times a year, trying to hinder the approaching weeds. 

I don’t like chemicals.  We are not allowed on our grass after it is treated.  We have to wait for the rain.  What good is having a lawn if you can’t use it as a bathroom?  We trek over to the neighbors and pee on their dead grass and weeds which I don’t like, because of the splash factor.

I try to tell Daddy that he has to be careful when he puts down the treatment.  If he puts too much, it burns the lawn. But he doesn't listen. Even though we have a small yard, he insists on using all of the chemicals in the bag because humans have to use everything they buy or they think they have been cheated. 

A week later there were dead spots on our lawn.  I looked at it and thought: “Well, the dummy put down too much chemical,” but somehow it was decided that the spots were caused by Pocket and I peeing on the grass.  Say what? Humans always jump to the wrong conclusion. 

Now that they identified the problem, they were determined to fix it and targeted my precious bodily fluids. Every post they read online suggested giving me an expensive treat to turn my pee into something that would not damage the lawn. 

At first, I was excited.  I am all about solutions that involve treats.  But then I became concerned. If the treat affected my pee, would dogs know it was mine?  Would my message become garbled? I don't want my sniffers to think I am slipping into senility because my pee is on the juice.

Thankfully my mom, who is often the voice of reason, nixed the pill idea.  "I don't want them taking anything like an insecticide," she said. Preach! "I want something we can put on the grass."

Papa went back to the University of Google.  "There really isn't anything beyond using the hose," he said. The hose!  I had not been hosed down since I was a wayward coed on Spring Break seven years ago. I was about to raise a leg in protest when Papa explained it was the grass that would be watered down. 

After all the drama, the solution was water, which was fine with me.  My only involvement will be to watch them foolishly water the lawn after I pee wasting one of our most precious resources.  Perhaps, if they are fortunate, a pee tree will grow there. 

With a little luck, the fertilizer that turned the grass brown will be washed away too.