Since the beginning of time (well, 2005), my mother has been engaged in a passive-aggressive battle of wills with her neighbour over the condition of her lawn.
My mother is that special sort of gardener who cannot keep a plant alive despite her best efforts, and whose garden is more filled with whimsical gnomes and fairies rather than thriving shrubs and perennials.
This passion for lawn ornamentation is something we share, though I have not been able to fully bond with a lawn gnome since 2001, when I was involved in the business of rescuing and rehabilitating lawn gnomes. I would buy them, clean them, repaint them, and then find them new homes on my mother's lawn, nestled in her overgrown lilac and rose bushes.
Pruning is a skill she's still working on.
That gnome rehabilitation initiative came to a tragic end one weekend, shortly after my high school graduation, when the inaugural gnome, whose shining, perfectly painted face had inspired dozens of similar rescues, met an unfortunate end.
A soccer ball, which I had kicked for the benefit of my beloved dog Elmo, hit the gnome in the head.
The lawn mower was throwing chunks of ceramic for weeks.
Anyway, since those days, my mother has moved three times, finally settling in Wainwright with my dad, who retired from the military there.
One summer afternoon in 2005, the first summer my parents spent in that home, my mother was sunbathing on the patio when the unforgivable happened.
While standing in the yard with said child, the neighbour mumbled something to herself. Her husband overheard her speaking from inside the house. “What?” he shouted.
“Mom says she wishes the neighbour would cut their grass!” hollered the child.
To be fair, my mother was quite out of sight, and the woman next door had no idea she was there at all, nor did she expect her young son to so thoroughly betray her.
Startled, my mother sat up to inspect the condition of her lawn. Yes, it was taller than the neighbours', and no, it was not half as neat. In her defence, however, my mother's lawn has four or five trees, a fenced area for the dogs, a pile of firewood by the shed, and it is quite a bit bigger than the neighbours'. It hadn't been mowed in a few days, and yes, there were a few dandelions.
In contrast, the neighbours' lawn is perfectly square, mowed every two days, never allowed to grow above two inches, with no trees, flowers, gardens, ornaments, or children's toys, all carefully contained in a perfect, white chain-link fence.
Since that time, every summer, the claws (and pruning sheers) come out, as the neighbour makes pointed comments when she sees my mother in her yard, always in the guise of friendly comments made to her son. To this day, she has never spoken to my mother.
On one notable occasion, my mother glanced out her window to see the neighbour carefully cutting off branches of my mother's tree that had dared to lean over her fence.
As each branch fell, she picked it up and tossed it over the fence, onto my mother's lawn.
My mother has hired a neighbourhood teenager to cut it twice a week. Some of the trees have died and been removed, a little garden put in their place, and the gnomes are almost obscured by the plants growing there.
The plants themselves are mostly the product of the bird feeder falling over.
But even random corn stalks, strawberries, and wild wheat are a garden, just not an orthodox one.
With Bonnyville's new unsightly property/community standards bylaw, it has made me think. Who gets to decide what's unsightly? Are toys unsightly? Lawn gnomes? Trees? Corn stocks? Bikes and swimming pools?
If we all lived our lives as my mother's neighbours do, we'd eradicate urban wilderness, drive out the animals that infiltrate our sanitized living places. We would never be woken up early on Sunday mornings by children playing because there would be no places for children to play.
Sure, if we all lived like that, it would mean I wouldn't have to spend any more phone minutes listening to my mother rant about the neighbour's newest transgression.
But where would the lawn gnomes live?
Last week, my mother came home from work to discover someone had mowed the lawn in her absence. The teenager she had hired to do so had recently found other employment, so it wasn't her. My father was out golfing and hadn't been home.
It was a mystery, and that night on the phone, my mother was filled with conspiracy theories about the neighbour mowing it when she was gone, or someone roaming the backyards, mowing against peoples' wills.
“It's just ridiculous,” she added indignantly. “I mowed it two days ago!”
The plot thickened the next day, when my mother returned home from work again, only to find the neighbours had moved out during the day, somehow, and a new family had taken their place. No explanation, no goodbye, no moving truck being loaded up with sofas and an alarmingly high-tech lawn mower.
So was that mystery mowing a passive aggressive attempt from the neighbours to get the last word before disappearing, never to be seen again, replaced by a young family that brought with them toys and pools and bikes to litter the yard?
Or has my mother had the last word after all, scaring the neighbours off with her strange gardens and affection for stranger lawn ornamentation?
I guess we'll never know.
