Neighborhoods
It’s Sunday morning, just after dawn. In a few hours, I’ll climb aboard the zero-turn mower and head for the high green seas that our lawn and field paths have become. It’s a simple recipe that got us to this point: a couple weeks of 70+ degrees and sun, two rain-soaked days and no time during the workday to get out and tame any of it.
Until today. The meadow is more prairie than lawn at the moment and I’m already apologizing to the random patches and clusters of wild ranunculus and yarrow that will bend beneath the cutting deck (dialed up to the highest setting) and lay sliced in two by the whirring blades. We console ourselves with the fact that there is still plenty of pollen to go around as spring establishes herself and turns her full attention to all things procreative.
If you’ve not had the privilege of surveying any landscape from atop a riding mower of some sort, it’s a grand and unrivaled meditation, cheaper and more effective than any therapist’s couch-and-office arrangement. Nothing between you and the sky, a tidy-ish trail of serviceable compost material in your wake and that glorious feeling of accomplishment as you’re brushing grass clippings from your sleeves while standing on the front porch. A cold cran-razzberry LaCroix plucked from the door of the fridge puts the exclamation point where it belongs and makes you ask if there’s any possible way to move your retirement date up a year or two (there isn’t, but a lot of dreams unfurl out there in the Great Wide Open).
What pulls me forward, though, to suit up and get out there is more than the satisfying outcome (and “suit up” is accurate—long lightweight pants, a shirt with some manner of sleeves, earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones, safety glasses, sturdy boots, gloves that no thorny vine can penetrate, sunscreen slathered on anything that isn’t already covered, cell phone in the well just south of the cup holder and lastly, a deep sense of anticipation that in a few hours, things will look better). Once in motion, the mower and I glide and occasionally bump through an evolving series of “neighborhoods” connected by the subtlest of ecosystems, each a wonder unto itself.
From the old old goat barn where the mower lives, I back into the slope that eases its way up to the house, shift forward and skirt the edges of the eastern field where the goats used to graze their days into dusk. Open and undulating with this season’s goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace and thistle still in their infant stage, the sky just hangs there all blue and sometimes cloud-scuttled, a perpetual invitation to look up no matter what you’re doing. Stalwart and grandmotherly, the land’s oldest mulberry tree leans her canopy over the barn roof, offering her thumb-sized fruit in June to the swallows that nest in the barn’s eaves. A fat groundhog has tunneled its way beneath the piles of wood we’ve collected for some unknown project and we’ve learned over time not to open the door on its sliding track after sunset.
Following the field edge north, I’ll make my way past the pallet-enclosed garden with its raised beds that are more or less weed-free. Raccoons and other night marauders have left the garlic and onions alone but we’ll need to fortify the potato and cabbage rows with tall fences and stern looks. Just past the garden (still looking northward) is an open patch where we used to free-range our meat chickens back in the years when we had nothing else to do after work. It’s now home to a burgeoning mini-forest with volunteer maples and sycamores and we’ve added two Montmorency cherry trees and a curly willow to the mix. A little tricky to mow around but worth the effort, our dear late Copper kitty rests beneath one of the cherry saplings, her headstone a curled-up cat made of concrete, missing an ear. I pass with respect and a twinge of melancholy.
The path narrows as it continues past the white pine-encircled sweat lodge where we tried for years to plant all sorts of different pines and arborvitaes and silver maples on the north side of the circle, but with no luck. They were rejected, eaten and hobbled each spring until we turned our attention to other things and now, suddenly, there are too many sycamore saplings to count, providing our wandering deer with a place to rest their lanky limbs out of sight. They’ve turned it into their own small village and I’m glad for it. Keeps them preoccupied with raising their young instead of grazing on our lettuces and tulips to the south, trying their best to have a season of their own.
Once I’m past the deer village, things start to get more serious and wild as the path slopes downward and the grass thins under the leafy branches of box elders and cherry. Make a left at the first of the black walnuts and now I can no longer see anything remotely human or civilized. I’m in Their Country now, heading west where the foxes and coyotes and skunks all live and move and have their babies and protect them like any living creature does. I straighten up in the mower seat and pay attention. Who’s to say they won’t band together and pile onto this large and snarling machine come to disturb their peace, carrying me away after they’ve turned off the engine and tossed the key into the creek? (The farther I get from the house, the more my imagination runs riot).
But this is where the magic is, dear readers. On walking days, my footsteps rarely stray from this section of the paths and our outdoor roommates get to do things their way. I’ve made it a bit of a rule that when I’m trimming brambles or pulling vines, I keep to the mere fringe of the tree line and leave the lopers behind should I need to venture in further. I come into these wooded sanctuaries unarmed and in peace; my boots and clumsy gait are intrusion enough. A few winters ago, some straight line winds toppled one of the cottonwoods across the path that borders the western edge of the field-turned-woods and I step over each branch (from memory when they’re buried in Virginia creeper and poison ivy). If we ever do get out the chainsaw and finally clear the way for less encumbered future walks, I expect I’ll still lift my feet up and over the ghosts of these limbs out of habit. Muscles have a way or remembering, don’t they…
A diagonal path running southwest to northeast takes me past thick thickets of multiflora roses (from which we now harvest the vitamin C-rich rosehips for tea every autumn) and wild blackberries. When I turn off the mower, the mockingbirds in their wooded grove take up their repertoire of impressions again (blue jay, towhee, woodpecker, oriole. And repeat). Invisible improv coming from the unfolding canopy of fresh spring green leaves, it is enchanting and darn near impossible to get back to the task at hand. At the northernmost tip of this path is a majestic and towering stand of cottonwoods, their seed fluff floating and filling the sky with the feeling of unhurried laziness to which I aspire. I have now forgotten where the house is and feel no compulsion to return, ever. I see the green clusters of unripe wild raspberries and a sea of young plantain—can’t I just live out my days here instead? Sigh…
By now, my ears are feeling the pinch of the noise-cancelling headphones and it’s probably time to finish up this tour and head back to a few conveniences (a shower comes to mind and will be necessary). I’ll do a quick tick-check after I’ve tucked the mower back in its shelter and trudged up the slope to the house. Once on the porch, I’ll turn my gaze to a sweeping view of green velvet that rolls on for acres and watch as the barn swallows pick through the fresh clippings for displaced bugs, relishing the feeling that I’ve accomplished something worthy of the effort. This scene will last until the next round of soaking rains and warm, sunny days pull the grass blades upward again. I’ll dial the cutting deck a setting or two lower and then it will officially be summer.
