It's Not About the Lawn

I've been putting off telling you about it, the lawn. How hard it has been this summer. How much I have been hating it, the mowing. Not just how physically difficult it is (was I stronger last summer, or is it just way beyond time to sharpen those blades?)

Yet I head out there every week and say the same mantra to myself as I grip my hands around the handles and bear down with my shoulder muscles, a 45-degree angle push to get things going, the sweat on my brow apparent instantly.

It's not about the lawn.

It's not about the lawn.

It's not about the lawn.

I tell myself to just be there, in the moment, the grass clippings flying all over my feet and legs and clothes and hair and, if I'm not careful, in my eyes. I tell myself to let it wash over me, whatever is meant to happen and, as always, to trust the journey.

Last year, this meant many serendipitous conversations with passersby and neighbors. This year, not so much. They're on to me, I suppose, and run for the hills when they see me coming with that mower. And so, most of the time, I'm out there alone. My younger daughter will sometimes join me, like the week I questioned my sanity as I pushed, pushed, pushed until I finally realized she was walking in my path, singing, "It's all about love, love, love" over and over again and I kicked off my flip flops and traced a heart in the grass with my bare heel and thought, "Well, yes, okay, that works."


And, other times, I get to thinking that if it takes three years to convert a pesticide-laden farm to organic, then it takes three years for a lawn as well, and next year will be my third. And not only will the lawn be completely organic then, but also petroleum-free. No gas (or electric) equipment will have graced it for three years. And that keeps me going, another heart-pounding row.

But most times, I just get to thinking. Just thinking. Thinking about everything going on in my life, the City of Dunwoody Sustainability Commission stuff, the community garden, my articles, the books I'm trying to sell, my family, how much I'd like to plant an orchard right where that tough-to-mow part of the lawn is.

And I think of what Tim said that time, that everything is hard, the question is "Is it worthwhile?" You remember Tim and Liz. They sold their big on-the-golf-course home and bought a large, scrappy piece of land on which they built a house and started a grass-fed-meat farm less than two years ago, with absolutely no farming experience at all. Well, here they are now:



And all I'm trying to do is mow the lawn?! Push on, Pattie.

Time is passing. I'll be over the crest of the hill on this lawn thing for this year soon. It's like the other day when my younger daughter and I rode our bikes to her school to test a new route there and we turned a corner and were faced with an enormous hill.

"Let's just go as far as we can," I said to her, and ahead we went. We kept pushing and pushing and suddenly we stopped, looked back and saw we had almost done the entire hill.

"It wasn't as bad as it looked in the beginning," my daughter said, and she was right.

The lawn thing, however, is worse than it looked in the beginning, back in April when the lowest setting for the wheels didn't even reach the grass. Now, I have them on the highest setting and sometimes the wheels just dig deeper and deeper, with no forward movement, until I've created a bit of a ditch. I'm not sure it's sustainable, year in, year out, this push reel mowing. My right knee makes weird noises that it didn't make a year ago. My heart thumps so hard I have to just stand there and breathe in, breathe out. I drink at least four Klean Kanteen's worth of water. And it doesn't even look all that great when I'm done.

I push. I breathe. I think, getting lost deep in my thoughts in that way you can only when you're doing something completely monotonous, an experience of which convenience gadgets and outsourcing our lives has robbed us.

Today is the last day of summer vacation here in Atlanta, if you can even believe it, even though it is still 95 degrees out and August, for goodness sake. I think of how I never even told you about my summer reading. About the beautifully-written, poetic Epitaph for a Peach, and Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, which had chapters titled Crevice Invasion, On Gopher Humps, and The Pharmacy of Molds. I haven't even gone into detail about Michael Perry, who wrote Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting and also a gem of a book titled Population: 485 and who is now my favorite contemporary writer. Perry is smart, funny, and thoughtful, with a masterful grasp of language and a seemingly limitless wellspring of emotion and experience.








I progress slowly but steadily from the side lawn to the front to the other side, saving the back for another day.

And I think of how my children move on tomorrow, a grade older, new environments for both of them. I realize I never shared with you the poem I wrote, on the salty-water-speckled inside back cover of Coop down at the beach right about when this mowing started this year. I sat on the sand and my older daughter went out, deeper and deeper into the waves, farther and farther away from me, perfectly fine in reality (the way children-no-longer-children are ready to leave their parents) but every horror movie running through my overactive imagination:

Letting Go

The foam-tipped torrent
Tossed her heels over head
And dragged her bruised and battered
Along the ocean's bed.

An undertow
Swallowed her
And carried her
Where, I do not know.

In an instant
The sharks, those monsters of the depth
Made her gasp for breath
And left me standing helpless on the shore.

Or at least
It appeared that way to me
From where I stood
Wanting, praying for the day to turn out good.

Used to be I used to love the beach
Never deeming its dangers a deterrent
But never more
Since I became a parent!

And so I let go. I push on. I move on. Tomorrow starts a new phase in our lives. And perhaps, before long, I will turn the corner, once again, on the lawn as well. It will get easier. I will do a handspring again this year when the mowing season is over, if my knee lets me. And I will decide, once more, if it was simply hard. Or worthwhile.

It's Not About the Lawn