Grass grows at its own pace, coming back each year from the tan dormancy where it dreamed of a life without earthworms. The worms haunt the Zoysia even though the grass knows they are good for it. They're like sex without love. They're like property taxes for a homeowner. They're like a bloated defense department budget's raison d'être.
Cliff is mowing the grass down the hill on the right. Jamie is trimming her rose bushes up on the left. Somewhere off stage you can hear the sound of a cement mixer pouring a new driveway in that area that was just woods last year. The sounds of all of man's machinery drift upward into the sky and become mixed with the spin of the planet. Somewhere out there it all morphs into a low hum which sums us up in an understandable way to the trained Ear.
The kids age one year at a time. This is this year; it is not the year they cut their first tooth and it is also not the year they lie down with that final fatigue. This is the year they graduate from high school and get ready for college in one house. In another house, it is the year they go through a horrible divorce. Someone said that the unstable boy down the street stabbed his mom and she's still letting him live there. It's the year for worrying about that decision. But it's only one year in a line and the folks in the neighborhood cherish the succession. They get down on their knees every day and pray for boredom. Just let the brown mat become green again.
Somewhere there are fanatics with suitcase nuclear devices. These madmen hate the folks on my street even though the people around me harbor no ill will toward any man. These madmen hate us in a visceral and evangelical way that not even the Nazis or the Japanese hated us earlier in the last Century. Most of the folks where I live believe that one man arrived long ago to cleanse their souls of hate. The ones who don't believe this would not be worth a damn in a good knife fight. Regardless, it's unlikely that I'd have much time to do any productive recruiting. It's true we're soft. We're just a little bit bored but we've embraced the boredom as a false idol of hope that nothing really, really bad will happen on our grid. We cherish our boredom as much as our enemies cherish death.
When the sun goes down each day and the motion sensing lights begin to work on every movement outside each household, how many of those beams catch any dishonest aspect? Is it one in a million? The rays protrude for exactly seven minutes until the next time, and it could be a possum or it could be nothing or it could be that one time that a large piece of shrapnel falls from the explosion at Cliff's house from whence the blast emanated.