It's finally spring. The trees are budding. Yards are green again. And, because the grass has grown all of 2mm since the snow melted, our next door neighbor is-- even as I type-- mowing her lawn for the first time in 2006. This is a red-letter day for those of us who live on either side of her, as it marks the official start of the yearly lawn mowing games. The woman is obsessed with having short grass ("short" meaning relative to the grass in the other yards on the block). She mows. That is our cue to mow, which we will get around to in a day or two. Then our grass will be shorter than her grass, so she will have to mow again. The game is to get her to mow as often as possible. It works best if we and the other neighbors stagger our mowing so she has to mow again to be shorter than ours and then yet again to be shorter than theirs. The real prize, though, is when she mows, say on Thursday, and then we and the neighbors on the other side mow as late as possible on a Saturday, which leaves her with long grass on Sunday which she can't fix until Monday because it would be unthinkable for her to mow her lawn (even on a riding mower) on the sabbath.

To quote my favorite picture book: "Let the wild rumpus begin!" (Okay, readers, where is that from?)