Got back from running errands Saturday morning to find the lawn people cutting the yard at our apartment complex. Grass and me go back a long, long way; we’ve been associates for many years. I played on neatly manicured lawns for what seemed, at the time, like eons, little millennia of my imagination. I clipped it around flower beds when I was older, a transistor radio by my side the only thing to ease the drudgery under the hot, summer sun. I also mowed miles of it for free at my own house, and for paying customers over many a junior high and high-school summer.
You’d think, after all that, I would hate the smell of the newly-mown stuff, but no. On the contrary, it’s one of those smells that, with the first drag in Spring, I experience an almost electric jolt, a pleasurable shudder from that deep breath-full drawn through my nose, past my olfactory organs into my lungs and my whole being. That tangy, earthy, greenish fragrance smells like love and childhood and life itself. I savor it and feel young, which is to say, I realize how young I still am to be moved by this mysteriously powerful fragrance. How can cut grass exert such an influence? I don’t know how, I just know it does.
At this point in my life, I try to turn lawn into garden whenever possible. Still, my ideal homestead has a little patch of grass, an elliptical lawn, enough for my grandchildren to play in and enough for me to mow, to smell, to love.
