For the third time, we’re trying to overseed the lawn and fill in a bunch of bald spots. The first two times, the grass sprouted, looked full and healthy for a few weeks, and then died off during hot dry spells in the summer. (Not all of it; I wish I’d taken before-and-after pictures, because the lawn definitely looks better than it did at the start.) This time, we’re trying fall seeding, and we’re adding fertilizer.

The seeds, the lawn soil, the fertilizer, the watering, the hours put into picking up the acorns and dethatching and loosening up the soil, the drop cloths I bought to cover the seeding areas before they sprouted, and everything else; it’s not trivial. At times I can feel my back pinch or my thumb get sore holding the thatching rake. It occurs to me that it’s actually possible to injure yourself doing this work. Having only ever watched people do it, I never thought about that. I grew up in a large-lot house in a semi-rural area, and I understand why people pay lawn companies for this stuff. I also appreciate how much work it must be to do this for a living. Of course people with the means like to outsource it.

How many times do you do this?, I wonder, seeding and topdressing the same spot for the third time, buying another set of four lawn soil bags for $10 a pop, another giant bag of seed for over $100. What’s the actual point of it? Is it responsible stewardship of our little postage stamp of land, or irresponsible stewardship of our finances and time? What is a homeowner supposed to do with a stubborn dead zone in the front yard—which isn’t even the part of the yard we can use for anything! With a tree that drops enough leaves and acorns to spend a whole day each week for a quarter of the year cleaning them up? Why does nobody tell you this is part of homeownership? It’s real money with no clear endgame and no guarantee of anything. And it’s just one little sliver of all the things you can do and need to do in a house. It could be a full time job all on its own.

On the other hand, though, I get a sense of satisfaction doing this and getting better at it, until at some point we’ll have it down. It helps to think of each discrete expense and task not as a thing unto itself, but as a step in getting good.

I think about sprayers, for example. The first bug perimeter spray I ever bought was the cheap one with the hand sprayer. After giving myself sore hands with that, next time I bought the battery-powered sprayer, which helped, but which had a weak stream. I finally went ahead and bought a manual-pump gallon sprayer. So now I buy the cheap refills of bug or plant killer, pour the gallon into the sprayer, and with a few pressurizing pumps for every ten or 15 seconds of spraying, I get much better coverage. The next step might be a backpack sprayer, or an electric sprayer with real power. Or maybe no next step; a little work never hurt anyone.

Same with our hoses. We started by eking it out with a cheap hose the previous owners left behind, which didn’t accept any standard attachments. So I’d cover it with my fingers to create some pressure. That hurt my hands too, so we bought a much better standard hose. Then an extension. Right now it’s in a pile; maybe eventually it will live in an enclosure. We started with a leftover nozzle, then a multi-setting long nozzle, then a sprinkler. Next might be another sprinkler, so the front and back yards can be watered at the same time. Or an automated sprinkler on a track, to cover the whole damn thing.

If I think about this too much, it all seems like a waste. If I don’t think about it too much, it feels right. It feels like an analogy for how our lives unfold. It’s almost like observing quantum particles (or whatever): looking at it somehow makes it go away.

I used to scoff at the idea of “upgrade paths,” which you hear about in electronics...