One of the places in Chico where I seldom walk is the street along the north side of my house. The traffic is too annoying to be of much enjoyment to a flaneur.

But for some reason I used that route one day to make my way home. It gave me quite a jolt. What a neglectful gardener I had been. This part of my yard had become waist-high with weeds. It's so easy to be in denial  when you don't have to pass right by it.

I don't live in the most tidy section of town. But it was clear to me that my weed lot had become the biggest eyesore for blocks around. It tugged at my middle class sensibilities. I had become a disgrace to the neighborhood. Now, every time I went out my front door, I could no longer ignore the jungle that was spreading just beyond the cinder block wall.

I don't know who owns this bit of land. It may be my landlord or it may be the city. I don't own it, and yet I feel it's my duty to take care of it. I have vestiges of  standards, which were formed when I grew up in an immaculate house and well-tended yard in the 1950s. This means I pick my clothes off the floor within a day or two of dropping them, do the dishes every two or three days, run a vacuum cleaner over the carpets in my house once every month or two and get rid of the weed patches in my yard once a year.

Usually, I wait until July, after I'm sure the rainy season has ended and no new weeds have had  a chance to spring up. But this year there were four times the typical number of weeds, and they were a new variety, taller and thicker.  Last summer, the lot across the street from our house was used as a staging area for a roadwork project. The heavy equipment kicked up dust, which blew the seeds of these monster weeds over to our yard. I'm just thankful they didn't spread beyond the cinder block wall and infest the rest of my property.

This year I did the onerous deed early, at the end of May, and approached it much more aggressively. Usually I spray Round-up over the weeds, then come back in a few days and dig up them up  with a hoe. This time it was necessary to go at them with a weed-whacker. What a mess. The stems were thick and juicy and covered with stickers. It took me a couple of hours to it all down.

When I was finished, it looked like a redwood forest that had been clear cut, full of ugly stumps and toppled stalks. Within a month, a couple of hundred new weeds had sprung up. I then went at these with a hoe.

For the moment, it's no longer an out-of-control eyesore. And I feel satisfied I have done my part in upholding neighborhood landscaping values.