Green green, it's green they say....

We're right in the middle of the worst season of the year. Summer? No-- grass cutting season.
When I was a kid, we lived in Miami. In Florida, you cut grass year round. Ours grew like wildfire. My mother was a lawn fanatic. You'd have thought the grass police would come around and arrest us all if the the lawn wasn't sculpted into impeccable style. She watered, and fertilized, and it grew even thicker. To make matters even worse, we had hedges; all along one long side, completely across the back, and half way down the other side. These had to be manicured with flat tops and perpendicular sides, and we did it with hand clippers. The long one was a hibiscus, and if you let it go too long the branches got as thick as your thumb, and tough as nails to clip thru. The driveway edges, sidewalk edges, and the borders of every flowerbed had to be edged, and we used the half-moon blade manual edger, the kind you step on. When I picture the house in Miami, it's never the inside I think of; it's of me, outside, lopping away at the hedges from hell. Mom and Dad slaved over that yard too, but as I remember it, I was the only kid in the neighborhood expected to do yard work too. Never my sister; she was "too sick". Anyway, I grew to hate gardening or yard work in any and all forms. When we bought our house 25 years ago, the "lawn" was a joke--the 2 acres had been carved out of woods, and between the tree stumps was mostly moss. These days, my hubby and son do all the mowing and trimming, and I keep my mouth shut, cause I'm not willing to do it, and so I don't get to bitch about it, right? But honestly, the lawn is horrible. It's all weeds, and tree roots poking up with sucker growth, except near the barn, where the horse manure that leeches into the soil makes for grass you could cut with a scythe and bale, it's that thick. So I am so glad when the grass finally stops growing in October or so, when the neighbors' lawns, raked, dandelion free, green swathes of even grass, will wither and brown up and make ours look so much better.