Round-Up changed my life.

Yup, I'm a convert to contemporary chemical technology for lawns.  Time was I would be out there digging up dandelions by the root.  Didn't take long to learn that the best time for such spade work was right after a big rain.  Loosen those roots a bit and out they'd come.  But the knees and the back paid the price for all that stooping and bending and kneeling.  And it seemed like a never ending battle.  See, those little puffy dandelion balls, that are so much fun to blow, scatter millions of little tiny seeds all over the yard, so that pulling one up by the roots just means ten more will replace it.  The ground is super-saturated with the wrong kind of seeds.

So it was Round-Up and Weed-Be-Gone to the rescue!  Like the cavalry topping the hillside to rescue the poor settlers from Indian attack, Round-Up was there for me.  Just mix up a teaspoonful in a sprayer and wander around the yard zapping the nut grass and dandelions and vermilion and hoochpods and such.  You don't even have to bend over.  Just set the nozzle on stream and blast the enemy from a safe distance standing up.  No dirt.  No digging.  No pain in the back or lower on the anatomy.

In just a few days, the offending plants began to turn yellow suffering the slow and painful death they deserve.  Each day I wander through the lawn observing the handiwork of Dow Chemical.  Slowly but surely I am strangling the life out of everything but Bermuda.  If it's not Bermuda, it's destined to die.

Where it's dead; it's really dead.  Wow!  This stuff is amazing.  It kills to the bone!  All over my lawn are the graveyards of recently living organisms now withered and brown and flat.  Dead. Cold.  Inert.  Extinct.  Never to rise again.

But now I am in the between-times, that worst of times when the lawn is neither green nor brown, but both.  The greenness of the green looks ridiculous by the brownness of the brown.  I now have these lovely dark green patches of Bermuda thriving and shining all across my yard surrounded by pockets of drought and famine.  You could probably play a good game of checkers on my yard by alternating the bright green Bermuda and the chemically blighted desiccation.   What must the neighbors be saying about this patchwork quilt of confusion stretching the full length of my house and stopping exactly at the edge of my neighbor's property?  His yard radiates the greenness of a healthy variety of plants.  My yard smacks of death and life at war with each other.

And now I'm addicted.  Every day I rise early to have my coffee and Round-Up (not in the same cup).  I can't help myself.  I prowl the lot searching for upstart weeds.  SQUIRT!  And another one bites the dust.  But I am learning that the overspray when shooting from the hip kills the innocent bystander.  The patches of brown are growing faster than the patches of green.  I think it's the brown that will prevail and soon my yard will be one big expanse of chemical death.  I may wind up on the EPA's list of Superfund Sites with 800 parts per million of dioxin, a petrochemical wasteland forever banished to the lifeless realms of outer darkness with nary a sign of life daring to poke it's bud above the hardpan dirt.

Yup, Round-Up changed my life.  I'm just not sure if it was for the better or for the worse.