You Might Be a Redneck If…

Jeff Foxworthy has made a lucrative career off his redneck jokes. If you’re like me, though, you’ll laugh, but deep down you know that his jokes are exaggerated for the comedy effect.

One of his jokes goes something along the lines of you know you’re a redneck when you cut your grass and find a vehicle. Surely, this has to be an exaggeration.

Maybe not.

Giant reeds, or phragmites (frag-mahy-teez), practically surround our house. They took over the side yard right up to the driveway and looped around the back of the house, leaving only a narrow foot path between them and the house. You can see in the picture how tall and thick they get. I cut them back off of the driveway almost to the property line, but in two weeks you can see how fast they regrow.

Technically, phragmites is a grass. It’s definitely not a grass you would want to make a lawn out of, but it is a grass all the same. I started cutting them down with my little brush-cutting weed whacker, but I wasn’t making good headway. I broke down and hired a local professional, Andy, owner of Xtreme Tree Service.

He came in with his bush hog and did some serious damage to the stands of giant reeds. At the back of the house, though, he hit the blue pickup truck.

Yes, we cut the grass and found a vehicle. That might not make us rednecks, but it certainly does say something about the previous owners, but that will be a story for another day.

Keith’s brother-in-law came down for a visit a few weeks later. He lives up in Pennsylvania smack in the middle of redneck country. For years, I reveled in teasing him about being a redneck. He comes down and sees the truck out back, and, let’s just say that he’ll never let me live this one down. Finding a truck after cutting the grass was the funniest thing he ever heard. Now it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen.

The truck sticks out like a sore thumb. You can even see it from the road. In addition to the truck, cutting the grass uncovered a couple of piles of broken bricks and cinderblocks, a couple of steel drums, old pipes, and a pile of about twenty tires among piles of other trash.

I began the task of trying to clean up as much of the mess as I could. I have no clue how to get rid of the truck, but I figured I could make the rest of the yard look decent. Keith gave up. The piles of trash were bad enough, but that truck irritates him more than anything else.

“Just let the reeds grow back over it,” he would lament.

Two months into the task of cleaning up, I was out back by the blue pickup truck and decided to take a closer look at the reeds Andy wasn’t able to cut down. Water sits in the back and I wanted to know where it came from. Peering through the reeds, I caught a glimpse of something big. My first thoughts were, “Don’t tell me it’s another one.”

Sure enough, hidden out of sight is another vehicle.

I think I’ll leave the reeds around it. I don’t want Keith’s brother-in-law to learn about this one. Of course, leaving the reeds around it would definitely qualify me as a bona fide redneck.


© 2006
Mark Darien
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