OCD and lawn maintenance

I am one of those neighbors...the kind who poo-pooh the neighbors who have weeds in their flower beds and have bare spots in their mulch and who plant too many different kinds of plants without any semblance of order to their landscape. I don't poo-pooh them to other neighbors, just on the inside where only I know I'm poo-poohing them.

Mind you, I do not have an ab-fab yard. It is neat for the most part, but certainly not the English garden of my dreams. I simply have had neither the time nor money to create the yard I envision in my mind.

There are some neighbors who have immaculate yards. These folks are ALWAYS retired. Then there are the younger marrieds with children who keep neat, though not fancy yards. Then there are the people who's yards unscrew the cap on my repressed OCD urges and make me want to scream. Some of these yards are downright messes...rampant weeds in every flowerbed, shrubs and bushes growing into each other. Others are just poorly designed...like a modern-looking house with down-home country elements (a wheelbarrow, for example) interspersed with contemporary bonsai-like shrubbery. Some of these landscape features do not go with the others, and I can always tell which ones should be eliminated.

There is something about seeing yard disorder that drives me nuts. My yard is very much like who I am. The front yard is simple....rocked beds with evergreens, and in the summer I have a pot or 2 of flowering annuals. Neat, presentable, not overly done...kind of how I think I present myself initially to people...my outward appearance. And then there is the backyard, which is unfinished, but certainly more relaxed than the front yard...kind of how I see my inside self. There is the English garden dream, but it is a work in progress. I would like for myself to be more free, more relaxed, more natural, the way I think of an English garden.

Of course once I start obsessing about yards, then I start thinking about all the other things I notice about houses, like siding that needs to be power-washed, crooked mini-blinds in a garage, a downspout that has come unattached from the side of the house. And don't even get me started on the things I see inside houses when I am on a binge like this: spiderwebs in corners, a slight chip in paint, a cracked tile. Let it be known that I do the same thing in my own house. I have only just recently gotten to a point where I can take a picture off the wall and hang another picture over the hole I left without first patching, priming and repainting the tiny dot of a hole first. Just knowing there was a tiny hole underneath a picture caused me anxiety.

It is really a shame my OCD just makes me notice disorder rather than making me a great detective or forensic scientist or something useful like that. All it makes me is a really annoying neighbor whom no one wants to invite over.