Yeah, we say it jokingly when we acknowledge some trait of an old codger within us: “You kids get off my lawn!”
Growing up in the 1970s, there were a couple of senior citizens on my block that would actually CALL OUR PARENTS if a foot strayed onto their turf while we were playing. So, why are old people so protective of their lawns compared to the under-65 crowd?
Once you retire, you have to fill up 8 hours a day that you used to spend working. Many retired people choose to spend a lot of time puttering about to make their lawns and gardens look really nice. Then those damn kids come tromping around the yard messing everything up!
Look at it this way. Suppose part of your basic unwinding every day after work is to work on a jigsaw puzzle for 30 minutes every evening. And suppose right after you finish that evening’s section, some kids come along and take a few pieces out. And it happens often enough that you never do get the puzzle looking quite right.
And turn down that damn music!
Some women just turn abusive as hell in public as they get older. It isn’t all of them by any stretch but it is enough to make the world a significantly more hostile place. Ask anyone who has worked in any type of service job if they would handle only A) Middle-aged men B) Twenty something females or C) female senior citizens. The results will be highly lopsided against choice C for anyone that has much experience at all. I don’t know why that is but it is something to be aware of. The lawn rant is just another way for them to vent some more of that volcanic level hostility out to the public and it gets seen by demographics that aren’t as used to it.
Children have incompletely formed concepts of private property and seldom tend to it.
I have a neighbor where all of the adult drivers drive about one wheel width up my entire lawn going up to their side door. Needless to say it turns into a mudslide every time it rains in the spring and nothing but weeds grow there. Sonsabitches…
My lawn is open to all 20 something females 24/7
My father-in-law had the problem of people turning around in his driveway and always cutting the corner. He could never grow grass there.
So he ended up getting a 2-foot boulder and putting it on that corner. It moves a lot and gets paint on it but the grass grows fine around it.
I’ve always wondered what’s up with people putting “NO TURNING” signs outside their houses. I suppose that’s one reason, but you see it even when there is no grass or anything nearby - just a turning leading to a gate, so you’re not even entering their driveway to turn round.
I always feel like turning round when I see such a sign, even when I’m already going in the right direction. 
The OP asks a factual question, but it’s the sort that is better answered in In My Humble Opinion. I’ll move it for you. Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
We have a neighbor that is meticulous about the outside of his house. We wonder if his wife is just as nuts about the inside of the house.
My husband has told me on many occasions, “If I ever get like that, just shoot me.”
Every little thing is perfect. He even had perfect grass but last year he had it dug up and taken away in pieces, then put new sod down. I don’t know why.
Well, I think the kids in the neighborhood just like to torment him, so his sidewalk always has rubber marks from them skidding their bikes there.
He has a platform built for his aging Golden Retriever. There is a big pad for him to lie on, a water dish, and a big golf umbrella.
He puts out a little tableau sometimes in the summer. I wish I could show you the picture, but I don’t know how. It is a kayak, up on cinder blocks. In the kayak is a large doll holding the kayak paddle. Surrounding the kayak are pots of geraniums and, inexplicably, a little cement hippo.
This, in my opinion, is what makes life worth living. Weird people doing weird things. Right around the corner.
I think the cultural icon of the old fart chasing kids off his lawn is the product of a particular time and place – 20th century (and especially post-Depression) America. Consider these things that all sort of came together in a relatively short time: Indoor plumbing became the standard, meaning yards and gardens could be watered with ease, which meant plush Kentucky bluegrass and lots of other plants not native to large swaths of America could be grown cheaply everywhere; push mowers and, later, powered mowers made it easy to tend one’s lawn; fertilizers and pesticides became common and affordable, especially after World War II; populations in single-family home neighborhoods exploded after WWII. The iconic image of which we speak really gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when a lot of WWII veterans were retiring in the homes they’d raised their families in. They’d spent decades fussing over their yards because (1) they could afford the technology and resources and (2) they had the leisure time to give to it. That created a generation (maybe the first of several generations) of people fiercely proud of their property and fiercely protective of it.
This is all based on personal observation of the “old farts” I’ve known and grown up with, including my father. I really think that people who grew up in or shortly after the Great Depression are emotionally attached to their property as few were before or have been since.
I suspect these people get up and look outside whenever they hear someone in the driveway, and they got annoyed with people turning in their driveway.
When I was growing up there was an old woman who would be holding an M16 or AR15 when she yelled “Get off my lawn!” :eek:
I have children and don’t want them getting run over when all they are doing is riding their scooters in my drive way.
My favourite old person story (and this is wonderfully anecdotal friend of a friend of an ex-neighbour sorta stuff) was a bloke who had retired and spent his days sitting on a chair in his yard, reading and drinking tea. His yard was meticulously kept and his lawn always beautifully mown, but one thing he never did was sweep up fallen leaves.
He didn’t need to.
There was one solitary and large tree that would shed leaves. He could see this from his chair. When a leaf fell, he would mark his page, close his book, slowly get up out of the chair, walk over, pick up the leaf, place it in the rubbish, walk back, sit down, open his book, and continue reading. I’ve always thought that was kinda cool.
I’ve lived in several of those post WWII neighborhoods, including Levittown, Long Island.
In one neighborhood in particular, our neighbor across the street fit your description perfectly. He actually almost tortured his lawn with the endless fussing, but was a very nice guy: Former military, in fine physical shape, just needed something to do and his lawn was it.
Old ladies are invisible to the rest of the world. I think the cantankerous ones are just trying to leave a mark. Notice me! I was here!
My mom lived next to a library on a busy street. If a car was parked in front of her house for more than an hour, she’d call the cops. She timed them.
She never abused anyone, but she never let poor service slide either. The older she got, the less she’d let things go. She took it personally.
Is that what you call it? It all sounds like noise to me.
In my mind’s eye, the “Get off my lawn” yelling person is male. Not that what you say isn’t true, but the old ladies have different ways of being curmudgeons in my experience.
Guy on the artery I use to get to the freeway has a house on the corner of a side street. He must spend his time making plywood cutouts of figures, painting them, then displaying them on his lawn. He has literally dozens; the car there is always parked on the driveway and I suspect its because the garage is filled with racks of these things. He rotates them according to the holiday or season and sometimes has nothing at all for a week or two before bringing out another set. Every couple months a never-before seen one or set will appear.
He’s got no ‘granny fannies’ thank God, so it’s just something interesting and harmless to spot when I drive by.
I haven’t got a lawn 
Clear off anyway
Following a hopped-up rice-burner that was rattling windows with its stereo, I spotted this bumper sticker on the car’s butt-end: “If it’s too loud, you’re too old”. That was two years ago. I still don’t have a comeback for that one.
Maybe I am (sigh!)