At last, some heat, and this is the day I chose to don my denim mechanic’s coveralls and tackle mammoth clumps of undesired grass growing along the back fence. The word “grass” may be deceptive here. Grass can be soft, delicate, and green. It can be cool and inviting, or shorn short, confined to a lawn, and possess a demure name such as Kentucky Blue. This thing that I faced was none of that. A monstrosity grown to 4 feet in height, it was dry, tough, and tenacious.
Armed with a hori hori, I stabbed the dry earth around the clump's base. Pryying, slashing, poking, sweating, I could not unearth it, this whatever it was. Call it dinograss. Casting my weapon aside, I pulled on the obdurate verdure with two hands, leaning back with all my weight. I feared it would suddenly come loose, and I would fall backwards off the hill. I needn’t have worried. It would not yield.
Eventually, I trimmed it back like a hedge and vowed to return with herbicide. Using weed-killer is a sin I’ve yet to commit, but embroiled in this fierce battle, I felt the temptation. I imagined employing someone else to do it, gardener as hired assassin, so that I could pretend innocence. Other similar clumps fell under my mighty hori hori on this day, but the one, the beast, my Moby Weed, remains.
Later that night, I searched “horrible weed that grows like tall grass in a clump,” and Google’s AI overview told me: The "horrible weed" you're describing that grows in tall, clumpy grass could be Nutsedge (also called Nutgrass) or Tall Fescue.
I felt strangely judged by the quotation marks around “horrible weed.” Why, this was just a friendly Nutsedge that I have been defaming and plotting to kill. A yummy sounding patch of Nutgrass or maybe a stately Tall Fescue. What a monster I have been, a mad Ahab bent on total destruction. Maybe I should end my reign of terror and get back to loving the lovely weeds.