The Anti-Landscaping Man Resistance Movement

Towards the beginning of August, I wrote about Landscaping Man, a local vigilante who critiques homeowners' landscaping through weird and cranky postcards. A couple of weeks after that, I promised to relate how one of my neighbors had struck back. But life got in the way and only now am I getting around to fulfilling that promise. I don't suppose anyone has been waiting on tenterhooks. (If you have, I'm very sorry. A tenterhook—a hooked nail for holding cloth on a frame—sounds like a very unpleasant place to wait. Still, in all frankness, I'm hardly to blame for your poor choice of waiting places.)

Where was I? Oh, right: the Anti-Landscaping Man Resistance Movement. Well, one of my neighbors who received a typically snide card from the anonymous critic decided to strike back in kind. He took a large sheet of laminated cardboard and wrote a mock postcard replying to Landscaping Man in like style. The sign said, in part (I here quote from memory), "Good Neighbor? Thanks for your concern ABOUT our front slope. You're right that it wouldn't take too long to clean up those WEEDS. Please take care OF them right away. When you're done with THAT, I'll have some more work for you."

My neighbor then taped the sign to a greenwaste bin (one of the three trash bins into which we are supposed to sort our waste) and left it out in front of his house alongside a pair of work gloves, a hoe, and a rake. I don't know if it gave Landscaping Man pause, but I thought it showed admirable spunk. And, to wax theoretical, that in-kind self-help retaliation surely offered a more appropriate response than invoking the majesty of the law.