Skip to main content

AstroTurf Yard

There is another house I see on my usual walk. This is on the side of the street where the newer, bigger homes are. There is an unbearable monotony about their perfection. This one like its neighbors has a yard treated with chemicals to the point not one weed is in sight. There was no breeze today and the trees were still like they were made of plastic. They have a couple of nice cars in the driveway no sign of kids.

I want to imagine who lives in this perfect house where nothing is out of place. I imagine the inside is just as immaculate as the yard. The woman must never have a bad hair day and the man must be a lawyer. For some reason a lawyer comes to mind. The woman I think is a doctor. This is a house whose care is outsourced - inside and out. Whoever lives here values perfection and is willing to pay for it. They live here but their lives are probably elsewhere. 

I compare this yard to mine where the weeds are growing adamantly and profusely. They have a mind of their own. My yard is alive not synthetic and comatose like this one. I have no perfection in my life and truth be told, I am not pursuing it with a messianic zeal. I would like more perfection but lack the courage to seek it. Often the threshold of pain must be breached for perfection to follow - it is the slow, organic and painful way. No different than me trying to pull the recalcitrant weeds in my yard.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I really liked reading this one.


I noticed that weeds are not bad as blindly believed by many. I saw many humming birds happily hovering around some pretty flowers drinking nectar. Believe it or not they made babies very soon.

Similarly another weed was the favourite of many dragonflies. I do not know its name.

I asked my son not to mow them down. As other species like various insects & birds also have a right to exist & live happily.

I am also somewhat scared of this fetish for perfection. I recall reading in Readers Digest a grandmother who allowed her grandchildren to mess around her house. When her daughter ( the mother of the children) tried to discipline them the grandmother told her:-

" Cleanliness is next to LONELINESS".

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...