The grass of the lawn is not grass at all. Instead it is a mélange of verdant flora spread across the inconsistent soil. There are cavities and bulges that would make this a much more formidable landscape if we were shrunken to the size of a shrew. At our current stature, though, these impediments are mere tripping hazards. Luckily, over the long course of the mowing season I never turned an ankle. I also never returned an ankle because I have yet to borrow one. Perhaps that is my Achilles heel, skin worn and peeled from years of mowing. The grass keeps pushing up and the weeds aspire to the blue sea of sky above. We must tend to these natural representations of something else entirely to counter the tide of chaos that washes in every day. The unkempt places in our lives become places never visited and only remembered in dreams. Upon waking with a rivulet of drool in the corner of our mouth we think we almost went there again, but in the morning it will all be forgotten.
We abandon these places because the work to be done is slightly inconvenient in this age of convenience stores and remote controls. If we could undertake this work through via remote control, we would become better people. Our wild places would then be meticulously and vicariously cared for to the point where they become perfunctory. Let us care for our wild places, but some must remain uninhabited and windswept and visited only occasionally. No mower or trimmer should enter these places. No tool or machine of this sort should enter the kingdom of the imagination.
The sweat on my brow corroborated the unseasonably warm weather for late September. The exhaust from the small engine burned inside my nostrils and my eyes felt heavy and wet from the allergens in the air and from the colored leaves thrown down once again.
