Your back yard. It’s pretty neat. There’s some lawn, mowed nicely into disciplined stripes. There’s that left corner of the lawn, the one nearest the Johnson’s garden shed. The one Johnson paints three sides of every other year. Some day he’ll paint the side that faces your lawn, but that day is not today. Besides, the garden bench that you tucked into that corner is cute. It’s cuter in the summer when those shrubs you planted three summers back block some of the shed, but it’s cute anyway. Some day you’re going to sit on that bench.
Your deck is nice too. It’s large enough, without being so large that the patio set looks inadequate. It’s a great patio set. I liked your deck better when it was floored with cedar, but you had to go rip that up and put down the expensive planking made out of recycled tires and oil. Your neighbors peeked over the fence and said they liked that stuff. They heard it was good from a friend at work who put it down. They say these things but they agree with me- it looked better when it was cedar.
The little plastic pond you dug in when your wife was away last spring, that looks nice too. It’s really adorable, actually. And the small orange fish that you drop in from time to time- they’re really cool too. I like them, your neighbors like them, your wife likes them. And the raccoons absolutely love them. They think you’re the best.
Your neighbors are okay. The Johnson’s are nice, even if they can’t paint the back of their shed. They do it to spite you, but you can’t accept that, and you shouldn’t. The neighbor on the other side, the one to the left, they don’t talk much, but they keep their lawn mowed so they don’t bother you any. The very back of your yard, that’s a bit of a problem. Some subdivision designer in the 1950s thought it was a nice idea to stagger the lawns; to mix it up. So you have two back yards meeting your one backyard, in the way that Manitoba has to contend with both North Dakota and Minnesota. It’s not ideal.
If your neighbor to the rear on the left would cut his grass once in a while, with at least some regularity, that would be better. He cuts it, or at least his son does, when the village sends him a letter and tells him to either cut it himself or the village will cut it for him at $100 per man hour. Even when he cuts it, or the times when they forcibly cut it for him, neither party weedwhips so it doesn’t really matter to you. Both outcomes are bad. You’d put the hammock in the other corner, opposite the bench, but you’re going to wait for him to sell or get foreclosed on before you do that.
This is your back yard. It’s fine. But to say that I’d trade your back yard for a Lake Geneva front yard is to state the most obvious. It’s in this discussion of yards that we come to a simple fact of Lake Geneva real estate. A suburban or city backyard is just that- it’s in the back of your house. Your street is in front, with your driveway and your 2 cars and your basketball hoop. There is a sidewalk to the front door, and then out of the back patio doors waits your backyard. In Lake Geneva, your backyard is where your street is and your driveway and your two cars and your sidewalk. Once you walk through the front door and open the patio doors and walk onto the deck or patio, this is your front yard. Welcome to the nexus of the universe.
I imagine that at some point every summer, new guests are invited to Lake Geneva lakefront vacation homes. These guests are excited! They wear khaki and white, and some blue, and they put the top down on their convertible if they have one. They have been given instructions from the vacation home owner via a text that reads, “We’ll be waiting for you in the front yard”. So nervous khaki and white wearing guests pull into the driveway, either a long one or a short one, it doesn’t matter, and then they see no one. They see cars, two of them, but there are no friends waiting for them. So they wait. Perhaps the friends walked to town to grab some drinks. That would be nice of them. So they wait a little longer. And then they send texts to ask where their hosts are at, and then there is no reply. So the friends put the top up on their convertible and they drive away in anger.
This could happen, but only because one of the two parties doesn’t know where a front yard is at the lake. Your suburban front yard is boring. So is your back yard. Yes, even if you put the hammock up and add the trampoline, it will be as boring as is humanly possible. A front yard at the lake is the action yard. It’s the lakeside lawn. It’s where house meets grass and where grass meets water. It’s where you want to be. It’s where your friends want to be. It’s where I want to be. It’s where you should be, and if you’re not going to be there a week from tomorrow we need to start talking, stat.