nice backyard...

i live (currently) in a pretty nice neighborhood. nice houses. nice cars. nice people (usually) tending nice yards. its all pretty much...nice. at least it looks that way.
my roomate/landlord bought a house on a corner lot of this particular subdivision, its right near the street, so it has a yard bigger than most of the other houses in the neighborhood. this leaves a lot of square footage to be taken care of. mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, moving branches. mowing the lawn again.
the funny thing is, the entire neighborhood has this 'my lawn must be perfect' mentality. i could break out my golf clubs (if i owned golf clubs) on anyones yard, and be perfectly happy to practice chip shots into the gutter or through windows or something. anyway, the point being everybody takes really good care of the front of their house. take note said the front of the house.
not too long ago i was doing some weeding and general clean up in the front yard, when i had the sudden compulsion to drop what i was doing out front, and move to the backyard, er..."backyard."

now i don't mean to put a slam on the house i live in or its yard, it is all much nicer than anything i've lived in before, but i couldn't help but laugh when i went back there. it was like a graveyard for plants.
there were skeletons of small firs, photinia corpses, and dead dirt everywhere. along with busted clay pot headstones marking the burial of some obscure bulb, faded plastic bins turned rose coffin, and i'm pretty sure an old Christmas tree too (not ours). the place was a bit of a mess. a bit dead.

it took me a second to take it all in. as i walked through it i was careful where i stepped; i was barefoot, and one of the first things i stepped on was a clip of nails for a nail gun, rusted and left over from the deck remodel. as i walked through it, i got curious and took a peak over the fence at our neighbors backyard. i'm not sure if i was surprised or not. i think it was a combination of 'WELL THAT EXPLAINS IT' coupled with 'WHAT THE?'
their backyard was the exact same, in its own individual way of course.

i was a bit shocked (but not...?) everything i saw from the road looked good, but the backyards (which you could not see...easily) were butt ugly man!

sound familiar?

later.