You’ll have to pardon our failure to maintain our lawn this summer. 

Blame the squatters in my backyard who are refusing to leave.

Spectrum and Verizon have been squatting in my backyard for 26 days now. Their wires haven’t been hanging across my yard the way wires are supposed to. 

They’ve been hanging out in my lawn, more specifically lying in grass that has continued to grow taller and taller over the course of the past 624 hours of summer.

“For your safety, do not touch or move the downed line,” Verizon’s website warns. 

I don’t intend to touch or move a downed line. 

But after 26 days, I’m starting to wonder: How long would you allow someone to squat in the grass where your dogs planned to spend summer frolicking and your family thought they’d get in at least a few Friday nights making s’mores over the fire pit? 

A day? A week? How about 26 days?

It’s been 26 days since July 3, the day Verizon and Spectrum went from hanging high in the sky above my backyard to camping out in the grass. 

It was a lightning strike that took them down, or more specifically took down my 100-year-old apple tree, which came crashing to the ground on the Thursday afternoon before the holiday weekend, ripping my neighbor’s utility pole right out of the soil. 

Within days an electrician and NYSEG were both on hand to restore my neighbor’s pole and power, while the landscaper we hired spent his holiday weekend Sunday chopping through the giant tree in my backyard. 

Verizon came by, said they can’t do anything until Spectrum showed up, and left. 

And so we wait. 

Twice now we’ve been told that Spectrum will remove their wires from my yard within 48 hours. 

Forty-eight hours have passed 13 times over since the wires arrived. 

I could have watched Gone With the Wind 149 times since they showed up and still had time for potty breaks. 

At this point, the squatters have been in my backyard three times as long as the time Apollo 11 astronauts took to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, land on the moon, make one giant leap for mankind, and fly all the way back home to Earth. 

They’ve hung out in my grass 514 hours longer than the Titanic stayed afloat and 300,000 times longer than a race car driver spends in the pit during an average stop in the Indy 500. They’ve even outlasted the length of the first Indianapolis 500 … by more than 617 hours. 

I could have taken in 170 Super Bowls — including the commercials and the half time shows — and watched 156 MLB games (post pitch clock era games, that is) in the time that’s passed since they arrived. 

But in all that time, no one has been able to mow my whole back yard.