Grass

AS PROMISED, a post about grass, and the many ways it has become a presence in my life.
Every aspect of the relationship I have with grass I like. It is the perennial guarantee that warmer weather is coming. If the grass doesn’t come, I’ll be sure to pack my bags in preparation for Armageddon, because something is seriously screwed up. It’s constancy in a world that has very little, is a comfort, and a reminder of the forces of nature operating on a level that continually awes me.
In late April/early May the field grass can increase its height two to three feet in a week. It hardens off in July, and if the farmer up the road doesn’t get the first cutting, which he didn’t due to our dismal precursor to summer, the grass will reach a height of nearly five feet.

In the wind this mass populous of stalks with fuzzy heads all randomly flow to the direction of the wind like rolling water on the sea. And when it’s still, the dark green fir trees provide a contrasting backdrop to the soft, verdant yellow-green horizontal line of a million stalks of grass. I feel protected and cloistered by these chest-high, upright sentinels.
On the morning constitutional dog walk, if the sun is out you begin to notice these micro-climates, where tiny clouds form and rise as the moisture from the dew evaporates. Exactly the same cloud generating system as the earth at large, but on a miniscule level.

The grass eventually go to seed, which releases a micro-fine powder of pollen that explodes from each head in miniature plumes. At this point in time the grass is about 4 feet high, and when the dogs run through it, all you see is the occasional upright tail and a plume of pollen flowing behind, much like an expanding vapor trail left by a jet at high altitude. It just keeps spreading, and sends an alergetic person fleeing for the nearest Kleenex box.

Big Grass
The field grass we leave for the dairy farmer to cut and bale for cow food (see the archives for a detailed description of putting up hay). He has big equipment designed for just this purpose. I on the other hand have a hefty, but “weenie” by comparison riding lawn mower as witnessed in these side by side photos.

 I admit to experiencing a happy little bubble of “farmerness” when tooling along harvesting my “crop”. But when Harold is cutting the adjacent piece, and we’re side by side at the fence line racing for the far end of the field, well...

Little Grass
Environmentally, the only way I can justify mowing an acre and a half of grass is to see it as a crop that has some useful purpose. Fortunately it provides that in the form of a smothering mulch that helps a great deal in beating back the weeds in the garden. We don’t use any chemicals on our land and thus, weed control is really an oxymoron around here. The general look of the place is tres “shaggy”, and when the big grass is high, a more apt description would be Serangetti like.
For some men, driving a lawn mower with precision and efficiency brings a sense of purpose and a feeling of accomplishment. Fruits of your labor and all that. Men have been known to go over the edge in a compulsive quest for the perfectly manicured lawn.
Not to take it too far, but in a world of chaos, focusing on the task of creating orderly swaths on a riding mower removes one from the dross of everyday life and offers, if only for a short while, the possibly of attaining a Zen state of meditative bliss that rivals years of monkish devotion.