Blessed by the Potato

My dad killed the lawn recently.

Not killed it in the way I might have killed a lawn, by slow neglect and poor gardening skills, leading to patchy dead spots, thinning grass, or the slow creep of weed infestation. No, he killed the lawn, the entire thing in one fell swoop with some kind of scorched-earth herbicide application.

There was some kind of mumbled reasoning about weeds and starting from scratch in the spring, but to hear my sister tell the tale “No, dad just got angry and killed the lawn.”

It looks so bizarre, because it is not the yellow-brown, patchy-looking thing that you might associate with the natural death of a lawn. Instead it is full of thick blades of grass, all greeny-brown and slimy looking.

The thing that it most closely resembles is the terrain of an undead world in some video game. Indeed, that’s exactly what I think of now when I see that lawn: that if I were to go around to all the houses in the neighbourhood with their green (or ocassionally, yellow) lawns, they would have perfectly ordinary townsfolky things to say, like “nice weather we’re having” or “things were better when the old king was around” or “I heard there’s lost pirate treasure down by the cove, but I’m not brave enough to go looking myself!” But if I went knocking at my parents’ door their video-game-selves would say suspicious things like “what a beautiful lawn we have, it’s just a little undead” or “zombies aren’t so bad once you feed them some brains” or “there’s been a lot of strange sounds coming from the basement lately.” I can only imagine that somewhere down there a portal has opened up, or a secret chamber wherein rules the Lich King.

Is my dad the Lich King???