Along with eye color and a knack for rolling your tongue, an obsession with the grass around your house is hereditary, I have learned. It is also, apparently, a sex-linked gene, because no little girl has ever been born wanting to mow the lawn.
I say this with confidence because the first thing my husband purchased for our son and his wife upon their move into a new house was a lawn mower. Not a bottle of champagne or even a coffee maker, but a gas-powered mulching lawn mower.
And the first thing Joe wanted to do after the movers departed was not to unpack all those boxes but to mow the lawn. Instead of lending him his mower, as Joe had asked, my husband bought him one because — and this is well-known in the lawn-mowing world — you never get your lawn mower back in the same condition. Something is always broken or missing.
Joe's lovely wife asked if she shouldn't just hire someone to cut the grass, considering all the work there was to do and how unhelpful little Mikey and even littler Jack were being. "No!" he barked. It was as if she'd asked if they could use a surrogate for any future children.
Now Joe, who never cut the grass in his entire history as our son, is filled with envy at the lush, green and weedless lawn his father tends. His, in terrible contrast, looks like a cat with mange.
"Patience, young Jedi," my husband told him. "This, too, will be yours. In about 30 years."
Lawns do not exist in nature. They are created and maintained by humans. In the 17th century, they were a sign of wealth. The larger the lawn, the richer the lord of the manor. It wasn't until the 1900s that lawns were found outside of parks, golf courses and estates. Now they are a symbol of the middle class.
But they have also become evidence of disdain for the environment. The fertilizers and pesticides are poisoning the water tables and waterways, critics charge. The men who battle dandelions and crab grass are now being accused of war crimes.
Not only that, but lawns suck up increasingly scarce water supplies — celebrity homeowners in drought-stricken California are being shamed on social media for their green lawns — and mowers pollute the air. Lawns are dead space, too, land that could be used to cultivate food.
But in fact, "turf grasses control erosion and dust; recharge groundwater and protect surface water quality; ameliorate urban heat, noise, and glare; reduce noxious pests, allergens and human disease agents; diminish fire hazards; provide low-cost security measures to discourage criminal activity and provide recreational, aesthetic and health benefits to humans," according to research published by The National Turfgrass Federation.
And the lawn does all this for about $347 a year and about 4 hours a week. There are about 50 million homeowners maintaining lawns in the United States, Joe and my husband included. They can't all be wrong.
For my part, I made it a point early on to never learn how to turn the lawn mower on. At the time, I was determined to make sure cutting the grass was never going to land by default on my list of chores.
I'd have never guessed my husband might sooner give me up than give up his weekly communion with his grass.
Susan Reimer's column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. She can be reached at sreimer@baltsun.com and @SusanReimer on Twitter.com.