We are dead to our current landlord

We gave notice on our rental two weeks ago, and since that time haven’t been able to do anything to persuade him to have our grass cut. Or answer his phone or reply to an email. I picture a sodbuster Tony Soprano looking at his phone’s caller I.D. and muttering to himself, “Fuck you. You’re dead to me, you hear?”

The back yard is so ridiculously choked with grass & weeds, the dog is afraid to venture out into it to do his business, so there’s a swath of grass just outside the back door that is yellowed and dead. And smelly:

Everywhere else it’s like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The plastic slide, pictured at top, is being swallowed by what used to be our lawn. With all our shade trees cropped to shoulder length by the landlord’s sadistic brother-in-law a few months back, and the people behind us having their big shady tree removed just a couple weeks ago, there’s no relief from the sun in the back yard at all except for about an hour a day, currently between around four and five p.m., created by the one tiny clump of trees that still remain in the otherwise blazing expanse.

I feel so White Trash, and not in the good way. The Boy is starting to socialize with a classmate who lives a few doors down the street. When he goes over to the classmate’s house, they have all kinds of swell summer adventures in his friend’s shaded, neatly-groomed back yard. Water balloons, sprinklers, all that Norman Rockwell shit you take for granted until you lose it. Then they come over here and I have to be the Bad Dad who says, “Sorry kids, you can’t go out and play in the back yard. Because our landlord has control issues, we are not allowed a lawn mower of our own and our grass is currently taller than you are. Additionally, the dog has mined said impenetrable veldt with piles of poop that can’t be seen until they’re affixed themselves to the bottom of footwear and been dragged back and forth a few times across our living room carpet.”

Today the neighbors put up a back cabin in the place where our beloved shade tree used to be. Which really upset the dog who, even at only five months old, is already exhibiting a fairly Zen personality most of the time. I haven’t heard him bark like that, come to think of it, since the tree-cutting people let themselves into our back yard a couple weeks ago to raze the neighbor’s shade tree.


The grass was tall even then. We definitely should have had the landlord cut it before we wrote him our Dear John letter.