Folks who think lawns are useless are folks who don’t have children

Call me Ahab.

For those of you unfamiliar with Scripture (my fellow Catholics are excused here), the first Book of Kings tells of King Ahab, who married Jezebel and led a sinful life, which triggered a devastating drought in Israel.

Though my wife is no Jezebel, and I rule no land but my own suburban backyard, I seem to have, like Ahab, caused a drought.

In Washington, D.C., this past April and May were the driest since 2010. Northern Virginia was officially in a moderate drought on April 7. By April 14, it was severe.

What happened in between?

I planted a lawn.

(Getty Images)

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Specifically, I laid about 3,300 square feet of sod in my backyard. When one lays sod, the clear instruction is that one must make sure the sod is heavily watered, right away, so that the grass roots will extend themselves into the soil. God found this to be the right time to turn off the spigots.

Maybe, I feared, God was angry at me for destroying the planet. That is, maybe the liberal media is right about lawns.

“Lawns are damaging our planet, ruining our health, and wasting our time,” explained a New York Times video portraying lawns as a relic of the patriarchy, or something. “The obsession has its roots in the manicured lawns of the European aristocracy … before it was reinvented for the white middle class in suburbia.”

This was 2022, so no insult was worse than European, white, has its roots in something people liked before 2014. These lawns require millions of gallons of water and “a cocktail of fertilizers and herbicides,” we were warned.

Read these articles closely, and you might notice an odd pattern: Amid all the crying that lawns are useless, you will not find the words “child” or “children.”

The folks who think lawns are useless are folks who don’t have children, or even know children. Children would rather play on grass than prance among your wildflowers or native waist-high grasses populated by native ticks and breeding native mosquitoes.

In the genre of anti-lawn magazine pieces, the 2008 New Yorker essay, headlined “Turf War,” was a rare one to mention children at all. The essayist, Elizabeth Kolbert, granted that lawns provide “children with a place to play,” but she insisted that “it has no productive value. The only work it does is cultural.”

Imagine valuing something because it’s good for family and the culture! How is it affecting the GDP, man?

So I went with children and culture, and then came the drought.

April in Washington, D.C., typically brings 3.21 inches of rain. This April, we saw 1.55 inches, with most of that in the first week, before I laid the sod.

The plague of dryness continued into May, and I have reason to believe this was personal: The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang showed that the D.C. area had less rain than anywhere else this side of the Mississippi.

“A DC rainhole,” the weathermen declared on X. But it got even more local than that. One day, my son’s baseball game half a mile away got rained out, while elsewhere in the region, my wife had to pull over because the downpour was so bad. Yet not a drop fell on my sod. It was the least rainy May in a decade.

Thunderstorms would roll in and thunder, but they produced no rain. Some days, the rain clouds would drift over my house and taunt me, holding onto their precious H2O like misers.

This was clearly God’s punishment for me. I don’t know what for. Consequently, I had to buy sprinklers and move them around throughout the day. The water was running constantly. My children didn’t have enough water pressure to take a shower.

Finally, in June, a package arrived in the mail. It was the statue of St. Jude I had ordered one day while taking a break from laying the sod. I set up the statue in the front yard. The thunder clapped. But this time the clouds opened and shared their life-giving waters with my grass.

MAGAZINE: THE WORST WILDLIFE REFUGE EVER

I celebrated like the Tim Robbins character at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. I was released at last from my prison of sprinkler management.

That’s when I looked down at the grass and noticed the grubs.

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.