By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

It's a few minutes before closing time on Friday night at Home Depot and the fate of the entire weekend, and maybe the marriage, is riding on this question:

Regular or dwarf mondo grass?

We've been here for almost two hours trying to decide. We've studied and stared. We've argued and discussed. We've picked up big flats of both and moved them around, trying to imagine them next to river rocks and coconuts. We've taken breaks to go shopping elsewhere in the store, together and separately. And still we can't agree:

Regular or dwarf mondo grass?

Like most international and marital crises, this one started small. A narrow strip of grass along one side of our house had died, killed by the shadows cast from an unfortunate planting of fan-tail palms, umbrella trees and 14-feet-high pink hibiscus.

No grass will grow there, we were told by a guy who should know because he runs a turf-grass nursery in Waimanalo. Mondo grass is your best alternative, he said, forgetting to mention that it comes in more than one size.

My idea is to create one of those walkways you find in Japanese temple gardens, a little dark and damp but evocative of green valleys and misty mountains.

By the time we reach Home Depot, we're in for the duration, no matter how much I remind myself now that we live in Kailua, not Kyoto.

We've spent several hundred dollars on faux moss rock stepping stones (carefully laid in Japanese odd-numbered style), another hundred dollars on gray river rocks that will provide the requisite zen austerity to the passage, and a little more on several six-packs of Asahi beer to wash away the pain of installing both.

Now, though, we're confronted with that choice that no one thought to think of of before we started the project: dwarf or regular mondo grass?

It's clear my wife favors the wild, unkempt look of regular mondo grass. It matches a planting she did years ago on the other side of the house. I prefer the tidy, manicured look that dwarf mondo provides. It contrasts well with the earlier project. Whoever said opposites attract probably wasn't thinking about the late-night discussions of garden layouts.

So we sit and stare. Talk and think. Argue our landscaping philosophies and plan our exit strategies. Finally, with the store intercom announcing an imminent closing, we have to make a decision if we are to complete the job as planned this weekend.

We make the only choice possible — not to decide tonight, not while there's an unspoken tension in the humid, Home Depot warehouse air. We drive home silently.

The weekend is ruined. The marriage is saved.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.