Harvey Estes: Grass is always greener over the skeptic tank

Of course, the Erma Bombeck book with that title has it as “septic tank.” It’s a great read, and I certainly do not wish to use her name in vain.

But when I watch the evening news, septic/skeptic tank comes to mind, because the content is almost identical. Thirty minutes is all I can take. I don’t know how these 24/7 news networks manage to keep going.

It reminds me of the joke about the guy driving down a country road with a load of manure. As he pulls up to a gas station, one of the attendants asks, “What are you going to do with that load?”

“I’m going to put it on my strawberries,” the driver answers.

The attendant scratches his head. “Where I come from, we put cream and sugar on strawberries.”

Which illustrates the thing I do not understand about public discourse. What sounds, looks and smells like pure manure to me somehow seems different to others. Somehow it seems to taste as sweet as summer fruit with cream and sugar. Or maybe artificial sweetener and fake dairy. I don’t know who’s on a diet and who’s not.

All this came to me, of course, during that mystical experience of revelation: mowing the grass. I got it done today as quick as you could check “None of the above” on a candidate preference poll. Because most of the yard was as brown as Bambi’s best camouflage jacket. Except, of course, for several broad, generous strips of grass that stood tall and green as if to taunt the rest of the yard, yea the rest of the neighborhood. And of course, they marked the exact location of the field lines of our septic system.

If terrorists from “Better Homes and Gardens” had wanted to bomb our neighborhood and drench all of our substandard yards with malodorous fumes, they had the equivalent of a giant bull’s eye to show them exactly where to drop the explosives. Let the punishment fit the crime; yards that look rotten should warn everyone with the same type of odor.

I put off work as long as I can. So before I cranked up the John Deere, I was chatting with my next-door neighbor and I told him, “Well, I gotta go mow the field lines.”

He stared blankly back at me from the parched desert around his own house. The bad earth there hides something underground: the city sewerage system. It keeps his entire yard a uniform example of the scorched earth warfare of August heat.

He looked at me as if I had just been discharged from the psychiatric hospital for newspaper writers. The only words he could manage to get out were, “Say what?” I pointed over to my back lawn, eking out first place in a meager field of yard competition.

“Oh.” He couldn’t say much; it was the first time that my yard has ever looked better than his. Sore loser. And also a “sower loser.” He immediately went to his garage and got some grass seed and started scattering it in desperate retaliation.

I always dread mowing when I’m sitting in an air-conditioned house in front of the widescreen and thinking about having to go out and work in the heat. But once I get out into the fresh air, that all changes. I need to get far, far away from the world of the skeptic tank of politics.

Even as I mow over the field lines that disperse the same type of foul, murky substance, I can’t smell it. All I can smell is lawn clippings like the sweet aroma of freedom, human dignity and respect for others. And I am reminded of Tom Jones singing that iconic song.

I have to say: It’s good to touch the green green, grass of home improvements.