Mother's (Earth) Day 2007

I am nobody's mother. Eccentric aunt, yes. So I send a few cards and make many calls. That's all easy. But hard decisions begin first thing in the morning.

My domestic partner (DP), bless him, would gladly take me out for Sunday breakfast, But neither of us wants to get up early enough to hit the restaurant at the crack of dawn, and I hate to wait forever for a table, which, later on Mother's Day morning, we would surely have to do. So we sleep as late as we want, and he gets up to feed the cats. He eats his cereal earlier than I eat my omelet. We do bond over web-surfing for favorite comics not carried in our local newspaper and the Sunday Morning show.

Central Florida's air fills our lungs with wood smoke for yet another day, so no long walk in the cool morning air. No, the swamp isn't burning (yet), but woods in Georgia and north Florida are, and wind has been blowing the ash southward. The cats sneeze a lot, but cannot resist the lizard-watching on the lanai.

The Sunday paper's ads offer Mother's Day specials on perfumes, jewelry, computers and the things I actually want -- wrinkle-plumper at CVS (with $5 in "extra bucks" for my favorite brand) and cypress mulch at K-Mart. I dash off to snag the items that will discourage unwanted features on both my face and my yard before all the other mom's get them. I did get the last wrinkle treatment of choice off CVS's shelf, but there was plenty of mulch at K-mart. Eight bags filled my sedan's trunk, but DP and I would return for a truckload of mulch bags later.

Having thus determined my upper body workouts for the rest of the week (mulch distribution), the time had arrived for the tough-love that must occur where nurturing motherly instincts meet the harsh realities of nature. Forget your watery images of Florida. I live on an upland sand hill. Grass is not meant to grow here, not that the cookie-cutter deed-restricted community developers 20 years ago cared.

When I bought this house, all lawns were sodded with Bahia grass. To replenish itself, Bahia grass has to go to seed a couple times a rainy season. The community's management company, however, first send homeowners nasty warning letters if our lawns did what they were meant to do. Then, years later, they sent us even nastier letters when the Bahia grass died, advising us to re-sod. Many did, with St. Augustine grass, which is tough and grows through runners instead of deep roots, and does pretty well when it finally "takes" on our upland sand hill.

Of course, the upland sand hill is still, well, an upland sand hill. You still have to water the St. Augustine grass as long as legally permitted on the one legally permitted watering day per week. You get the picture? So you get the conclusion, same as I did. In a part of the world with recurring seven-year droughts, why plant anything that isn't a drought hardy native plant?

So we planted plugs of St. Augustine in the "fringe" strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street, but haven't watered it since the grass sank its roots. We keep it and the weeds that are thriving in it mowed to an acceptable height and greenness, striking a balance between nature and the community management company. The rest of the lawn we planted with native plants, and mulched. There are decorative, fluffy, slow-growing palms, borders of mondo grass, and lots of mulch. We have tried a variety of ground-covers for the broad swaths of mulch, but so far nothing has thrived -- not even the clumping mini mondo grass that should have filled in the swaths within the full-size mondo-grass borders.

Right now, we have a combination of purslane, which flowers prettily in the rainy season but turns to a tumbleweed during the dry (we'll see if it comes back in June), and a variety of chicken-and-hens succulent. This morning, as I tiptoed through the front-yard swaths of decomposed 2006 mulch and its covering layer of oak leaves from the intervening winter, I had to make a few hard decisions.

See, this is the time for culling the contenders from the unfit, deciding what to shower with RoundUp and what to give another season's chance. The errant odd rhizome of St. Augustine is an easy call, along with the nervy dollar weeds and castor-beam shoots -- blast them all! But those tender little mondo grasses? I don't know. They'd look sweet as a mid-level ground cover between the tall mondo borders and the ground-hugging carpet of succulents if they ever multiply as advertised.

So, because this is Mother's Day and not Draconian Decision Day, I decided to give the tender and tentative mini-mondo's another year's chance. I opted for optimism. I chose the nurturing side of nature rather than its harsh Darwinian side.

Besides, my hand hurt from squeezing the RoundUp trigger. And my eyes were getting irritated by the wood smoke. So, as often happens, the comfort and survival of the creature at the top of the food chain determined the level of benevolence shown those life forms farther down. I returned into the house because, in the name of this higher purpose, the cats needed fresh water and petting and someone to lean against and purr. Let's not kid ourselves about who's in charge.