Got back from running errands Saturday morning to find the lawn people cutting the yard at our apartment complex.\u00a0 Grass and me go back a long, long way; we’ve been associates for many years.\u00a0 I played on\u00a0neatly manicured\u00a0lawns for what seemed, at the time, like eons, little millennia of my imagination.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
You’d think, after all that, I would hate the smell of the newly-mown stuff, but no.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That tangy, earthy, greenish fragrance smells like love and childhood and life itself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 How can cut grass exert such an influence?\u00a0 I don’t know how, I just know it does.<\/p>\n
At this point in my life, I try to turn lawn into garden whenever possible.\u00a0 Still, my ideal homestead has a little patch of grass, an elliptical lawn, enough for my grandchildren to play in and\u00a0enough for me to mow, to smell, to love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Got back from running errands Saturday morning to find the lawn people cutting the yard at our apartment complex.\u00a0 Grass and me go back a long, long way; we’ve been associates for many years.\u00a0 I played on\u00a0neatly manicured\u00a0lawns for what … Continue reading