National Lampoons Front Porch

We live in a very nice, residential neighborhood here in Morgantown. It's not upscale, but it's firmly middle class, and people take pride in their homes and their lawns. A lot of our immediate neighbors are retired, and they seemingly have nothing to do but mow their lawns. One man mows his lawn every day without fail. Another mows his lawn at any time of day. He mowed at 9:45pm the other night. It was dark, and Reed was in bed, but hey, I guess if your lawn needs mowed....

Growing up in Salmon, I never really experienced this "Keeping up with the Jones." Back then, Salmon didn't have any "nice" neighborhoods. Every neighborhood was an amalgamation of fancy houses, nice houses, and clunkers with yards full of trash and a lady who likes to feed feral cats. My friend Megan's family had a beautiful house and yard, but right next door was a semi-trashy complex complete with a little redheaded kid Megan's mom dubbed "Denise the Menace," who was always lurking around trying to sell us her toys.

My parents had a very nice house and yard, but it was flanked by a house in the midst of a huge weed patch on one side, and a house with the old couple Ken and Lucy on the other side. Ken liked to yell at Lucy A LOT. Thankfully, Lucy was profoundly deaf in one ear, so when Ken would yell at her, she would pull out the lawn mower and mow the yard blissfully unaware of what Ken was yelling as he followed her around shouting obscenities in her faulty ear.

My parents really did have the nicest yard on the block, but they weren't super diligent about cutting the grass. My dad mowed the yard, but he mowed it once a week, not once a day, and he just left the clippings in the yard. He called them "fertilizer." I remember visiting my Grandma in Kansas and being amazed at how, not only was the grass cleanly mowed and clippings free, but the lines from the lawn mower all fell into a carefully thought-out vertical pattern. That kind of meticulousness in lawn care was just completely foreign to me.

So now, I own a house in one of those neighborhoods like my Grandma's. Unfortunately, Caleb and I aren't meticulous people. It's not that we're lazy. We both actually work very hard, but our yard isn't first on our list of priorities. We do a lot of yard work on the weekends, and we've planted a huge vegetable garden along with a flower garden, a lilac bush, and a hydrangea bush, but during the week, we sort of let things go.

All of the neighbors have pretty potted plants on their front porch, so I decided we should do up our front porch with flower pots that would be easy to maintain. For Mother's Day, Caleb surprised me with three lovely flower pots on the front porch. Our neighbor, Georgia, an elderly lady who has become like family, also gave me a ficus start to transplant. Our porch looked great for a couple of days. Then I don't know what happened.

Now our flower pots look like this:

And I guess I didn't transplant my ficus soon enough:
And if you look across the street, the neighbor's porch looks like this:
These pictures were taken a week ago. The neighbors have even more beautiful flowers in front of their house now. Despite my hardest efforts, our flowers actually look worse. I guess you can take the girl out of the Salmon, but you can't take the Salmon out of the girl. I'm just not cut out for keeping up with the Jones.