You're probably not curious, but I am.

I've been wondering to myself for some time, about something that I already know the answer to, mostly. It's a question about myself and why I do things the way I do. A question about where I came from, who I am, and where I am going. The question is: Why am I a redneck? More specifically, What makes me a redneck? and Why am I proud to be a redneck? So I've decided to devote a portion of my diaper changing, potty training, love-food making, self each week to answering a portion of this self proposed question. I'd like to laugh with you, at myself  while I do it. This weeks red neck moment was, if you're like me, not so silly. But if you happen to be like my husband, pretty ridiculous. Sometimes that is my mark for when I am being a redneck, whatever my husband (and my neighbors) thinks is ridiculous.

Trimming the hedge with scissors.

To start out, I might explain that I have very green heart. My brain doesn't always work perfectly in that way, because I don't really put forth the time and energy to educate myself on everything I might do better, to be green. But it is instinctual to do whatever is most natural in any given decision. I am also a process oriented person. Much of the time, this also means that I will only begrudgingly pay someone else to do something for me, that I can possibly do for myself and usually I'd rather spend an afternoon doing something by hand than use a machine to do, even if it's easier or saves a lot of time.

My poor husband, comes from a place where water falls from the sky every other day. (That's why we dream every day and night of moving back. I am addicted to rain.) But as such, he has never given a second thought to leaving water running accept to avoid the annoying sound of a drip, drip, dripping faucet or using up the entire tank of hot water before it can be reheated.  I have two pet peeves: the biggest being when people, living in a desert mind you, water their driveway or the street with their sprinklers. The other (what would talk of rednecks be without mention of one's neighbors) is when my well intentioned friend Mike, comes over with his spray can of Round-up or his huge, heavy, riding lawn mower and tries to aid me in my lawn endeavors. I can count for you the number of times that it has killed the grass seedlings I have patiently and diligently watered and watched inch by inch spring forth from the ground only to have him kill them off in five minutes. I can only imagine that more than one of my neighbors is peeved at my sometimes called grass, being always overgrown and patched with brown spots and rotating areas of weeds because I insist on three things; watering without hitting the fence, pulling the nasty buggers by hand as a opposed to spraying some chemical based fertilizer or weed killer and my favorite tool is an aluminum push mower that is badly in need of a sharpening. And this concludes the introduction portion of our blog post...las (laugh-at-self)

But what I was really getting at was this:

To solve my neighbor trying to save the day with his mower I started a little home improvement project. I dug a very small ditch in my front yard separating it into two zones one side where next year I will plant a waterwise bed of rocks and perennials etc. the other side I will plant a tree and keep green grass. The green grass has been a success for the first time in my grass growing life!

The other day my smallest little nanite gave Ariel and I a healthy nap and we used it to therapeutically get some stuff done outside that normally isn't possible. And I did what my neighbors have been waiting for all summer, I cut my grass. Yes, I used my push mower. And then afterward, I realized what most suburbanites realize on a regular basis, my edges were a bit shabby. And not having an edger? I went for the kitchen sheers.

 

With my husband scoffing at me in the background, I cut the thick grass-like stalks down to show what is my beautiful shabby redneck border, enjoying myself immensely in the therapeutic process. Seriously. And I think that this redneck business must be contagious because after that my handsome husband invented a way to use the water that drips pesteringly from our faucet to water the beets that grow near bye, using a large broken ceramic jar I made in college. And thus, a tragic end to a piece of hard earned clay turns serendipidously to save us all from wasting our precious water.

I Love stuff like this! And that, my friends, is why I am a redneck. Lest I forget, our larger, more independant nanite helped too. She is very talented in the art of gathering weeds and putting them in a pile. She does this for me every time we go out and pull weeds from the grass. She loves to make piles. Her favorite kind of pile is a pile of blankets. Here she is in the act: