Yard Signs.

The ChemLawn truck banging through the neighborhood got me thinking of growing up in Tucker, Georgia, on Goodfellows Road, and all the ChemLawn signs all up and down our street, little badges signifying no weeds and lush grass and, even more importantly, an advertisement for being able to afford a little more. Not quite a yard service, ChemLawn. You're still mowing your own. But you've got people to stop by every now and then to do things to it, green it up, shock it into a state of near-perfection that your neighbor, sadly, cannot quite achieve, what with his lawn un-Chemed and all.

And you got two signs, of course: there was the regular ChemLawn sign that stayed in the yard, up by a tree somewhere, and then there was the one they'd leave after a treatment, down in front, by the curb, the one warning kids not to play in the grass until it was dry. Or even, if I'm remembering right, until a certain date.

That people would even these days call a company called ChemLawn blows my mind a little bit.

We had it for a while there on Goodfellows Road. ChemLawn. I remember an argument about it, my dad holding a position against spending the extra money, my mom advocating for things to be pretty. She won. We got the little signs. I don't remember the grass being any different one way or the other.

If it doesn't rain at some point, it's not going to matter how many signs my neighbors pay ChemLawn to stick in their yard. Cool today. Certainly not cold. And dry. Sky a whiteish blue. They want to give us a pretty good shot at some rain tomorrow night. I want to give us that, too. My yard's starting to look a little rough around the edges, and we cannot have that.