It's July here in Wisconsin, and your choice of lawns is either long and green, or trimmed short but burned brown by the sun.
Lazy SOB that I am, I haven't mowed in three weeks. But I've watered the lawn periodically.
So, I have a somewhat shaggy lawn, but it's green. My neighbors all mow their lawns short, also water like crazy, but their lawns are brown. One neighbor, who got a lawn twice the size it was last year courtesy of the city of Greenfield and the taxpayers, has a lawn that's beyond brown. It's a very light yellow, bordering on white. That's dead grass.
But I still hear the comments, when I'm not there: "Hey, have you looked at Dick's lawn? He hasn't mowed it in weeks." "Yeah, what's with that guy?"
Well, one thing that's "with me" is that the rabbits in our neighborhood have dug several nests in our yard. And the baby bunnies are just now starting to emerge. They're so tiny that it would be easy for me to mow them down into bloody bits of bunny fuzz.
Of course, I'm the neighborhood gun nut, so wasting dozens of fuzzy baby bunnies is expected of me.
My neighbors, OTOH, do it more quietly. They just drown the bunnies in garbage cans.
The sanctity of The Lawn, you see.