The grass had basically collapsed under its own weight, creating a frightening black hole in the thick green expanse of the backyard. “It might be time to mow the lawn,” said Stephen Hawking [1], making an impromptu visit to study the phenomenon (ba dee bedebe [2]).
“I think you're right,” I said.
Not up to the task of dealing with the back yard, I decided to first tackle the front yard—besides, that's the first thing anyone sees and frankly, I don't want to have to explain Maximilian Schell and his zombie army [3] to passing motorists. Besides, the grass in the front yard has yet to reach critical height, being only three feet or so high (the section of backyard that had collapsed had reached four feet in height).
So I spent the next few hours in the afternoon as Samhain, only an American-mongrel Samhain with an electric weed eater, not a Celtic Samhain with a particularly large scyth (Death and the IRS) [4].
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Stop to remove foot long strands of grass blades from the weed eater. Then back and forth, back and forth. Stop to rake the dead grass out of the way. Couple of hours, leaving, not craters, but pits in the grass as I step my way across the yard.
But at six inches, the front lawn looks lush.
And at the rate I was going, it might take days to get the backyard finished. That is, if I can avoid falling into the event horizon.
[2] http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/7452/
[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078869/
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/sketches/death.irs.html