“Please come in! And do forgive me, the house is a mess!”

This is perhaps the earliest realization I had that my mother was capable of lying.

Our house was never a mess. In fact, even all of our Home and Garden magazines lived in a perpetual state of display on the coffee table, splayed out just-so, like you were at a fancy dentist’s office. The magazines showed you what a home was supposed to look like, and our house was no exception. It stayed in a constant state of preparedness – as if a photographer might show up, unannounced, at any given moment to take pictures of our home.

This never seemed odd to me, not one bit, since all the houses on our street stayed similarly frozen in a state of perfection, with other mothers likewise apologizing for their invisible messes. It was just something you said, it had no real meaning. Just like the correct response might be, "I'd kill for an iced tea," and yet no one there would feel like they were in any real danger.

It wasn’t until the age of sleepovers that I learned what a real mess actually looked like, and it wasn’t my parent’s single folded newspaper, laid askance next to two perfect coffee mugs. Often there would be laundry scattered around the house, laundry that somehow found itself outside of its designated "room," or dishes in the sink from a meal we weren’t even eating.

"Sorry, the house is a mess!"

And I'm thinking, yes. Yes it is.

Which is odd, because you invited me here! Shall I return at a later date, once you've had (additional) time to prepare?

More often than not, I would end up calling my parents to regretfully inform them that I wouldn’t be able to sleep over at this house, something was terribly amiss here. Didn't they know you only apologize for imaginary messes, and even then, only to an unexpected guest? I mean, why would the house be "a mess" for an event they planned!?

I also couldn’t help but notice that, coincidentally, at many of these unacceptable houses, there were no Home and Garden magazines. So maybe that was it, these folks don’t even know they are failing, they don’t even know what they’re supposed to be doing! We should probably get them some subscriptions for Christmas.

It is no wonder that I eventually pursued a career in film, because I now realize that I basically grew up on a set. Our home, and especially our yard, was pure theater. Consider our WATERFALL. Aside from the one in our landscape, that cascades down into the pool, I can’t even tell you how many miles we would have to drive from Dallas in order to locate an actual waterfall like that in nature.

Many years ago, I drove across the Yukon Territory to Alaska, and it became clear that we weren’t going to get very far if I insisted on getting out of the car to take pictures every single time I saw another waterfall. Contrarily, when left to its own devices, the city of Dallas just isn’t all that pretty, and has almost no waterfalls whatsoever, unless you count the one on our iconic Coors Light billboard.

But I’m not complaining. If Dallas were naturally beautiful, our family probably wouldn’t have had as much success with our nursery and landscaping business! There might not be any natural waterfalls to speak of here in Dallas, but would you maybe like to have one in your own backyard? COVINGTON'S can do that, no problem. How about some huge, towering, palm trees while we’re at it? They don’t really grow here naturally either, but again – pure theater. You, too, can live on a set! Just show us a picture of what you’d like, here in one of these Home and Garden magazines.

People from my generation often comment about how they were “raised by the television set,” but from personal experience, I’d also like to add MAGAZINES AND CATALOGUES to that list. Many a rainy day was spent with home and garden magazines as my babysitter, and I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who grew up equating the photographs in "Better Homes and Gardens" with the standard we were all supposed to be aspiring to. I mean, even the superlative “better” in the title implies that these houses are probably “better than whatever you are living in, Buddy!”

And for the most part, and for most people, I have come to realize that those homes, in fact, are.

They are "better." But who gets to decide what better looks like?

When I moved into my artsy, Austin-esque neighborhood years ago, driving down the streets, I remember seeing all the imaginative, wacky, landscape creations. These were unlike any landscapes I had ever seen, and every other house had a sign in the yard that read, “Keep Little Forest Hills Funky!” But sometimes "funky" didn't even begin to describe what I was seeing. I started thinking that it was quite possible these people weren’t reading "Better Homes & Gardens" at all, but rather other publications, like maybe... “High Times”? Featuring articles such as, “Get Real High and Go Work in your Yard: How to Achieve Bizarre Things in Your Landscape You Might Not Like Tomorrow” and “Undoing Yesterday’s Odd Lawn Creations: You Can See That Doesn’t Look Good in the Daylight, Right?”

In fact, even some of the yard signs seemed to be admonishing the questionable taste level of others, as if the signs were having a conversation. Right next to the “Keep Little Forest Hills Funky!” signs, I started seeing signs that read, “Keep it Funky, Not Junky!” Hilarious. My neighbors are passive-aggressively arguing with each other, through their yard signs.

These signs relate a sentiment that is actually very close to my own heart, something that I struggle with myself, and that is keeping the ratio of plants vs yard decorations in check. This ratio should never start approaching an equilibrium, where you find that you have just about as many landscape “things” in your yard as you do actual landscape plants; you should always undeniably have more plants. If even just one person wonders if maybe you are in fact selling yard decorations, that is one person too many. Also, here’s a good litmus test -- imagine that a time traveler was magically transported from a parallel universe, and woke up in your yard. Now. Could that person unequivocally tell, based on the things in your landscape, what holiday or even what season is currently being celebrated? No? Then something has gone wrong. Come April, if cleverly hiding an Easter egg in the rib cage of a Halloween skeleton is an option for you, there might be too many conflicting holiday ideas in your yard.

However, I think everyone should be able to do whatever it is that makes them happy, so going back to the "Keep it Funky, Not Junky" signs, who gets to decide these things? By design, my neighborhood has no HOA to speak of, but do we maybe have an elected neighborhood Funk Master? Someone who reigns supreme and weighs in all things funky/junky? That sure does sound a lot like a sneaky rebranding of an HOA to me...

Sometimes the struggle isn’t even holiday related, it’s just that the sheer number of adorable, year-round garden accents in a yard seem to be overwhelming the landscape itself. And I get it, boy, do I get it. I grew up working at a garden center, so I know there is the very real temptation to incorporate every single good idea you come across, ever, into your own yard. But a whole bunch of good ideas, all happening concurrently? Well…

I briefly worked at a hair salon after high school, and I watched as the lady in charge of doing the dye jobs would habitually find whatever color she was applying on her client so beautiful, so irresistible, that she would be unable to stop herself from applying a little smidgeon of it onto her own hair. The colors themselves might have been beautiful, separately, but “beautiful” wasn’t the takeaway when you saw her hair. It looked sort of like she had tacked the pelt of a calico cat to her scalp. It overshot “beautiful” by about a mile and landed firmly at “insane.”

"Poor thing, look at her hair," you might hear someone whisper behind her back. "Does she have a medical condition?"

We don’t want our yards to be insane, or prompt people to wonder what medical/mental condition motivated our creations. We don’t want a displaced time traveler to have to wonder what month it is, because they see Santa inexplicably has a sleigh full of witches. We don’t want people to wonder if we have started selling yard art, or possibly work at a Hobby Lobby. Worse than thinking we might benefit from a Home and Garden magazine subscription, we also don’t want people to suspect we might suffer from having too many subscriptions, as our front lawn appears to have become a landing pad for every conflicting idea and decoration in the history of landscaping.

But we also don't want to have a neighborhood Grand Master Funk pinning shameful "junky" ribbons to our yards, just because they don't like our personal brand of funk, now do we? No. We want our landscapes to bring joy to ourselves, and inspiration to others. We want to be funky, but not junky. In short, we want to do….

Better. We want to have better homes and gardens.

That much we can probably all agree on.

But again, if "better" is just a matter of opinion, then who decides what's best?

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I talk more HERE about my getting addiction to curbside "Junque" under control...