Pete McMartin: Feel the kinship with the uncut lawn, the leaves of the grass

Opinion: For undefinable reasons — I think it has something to do with my age — I love to see the green grass riots nodding under the trees.

When I was a boy, cutting the lawn was my life It was the first real chore.

As an indifferent gardener, my dad let go of the lawn until it reached the fail-safe point, overcoming his will to act there and reaping instead of reaping. rice field. , Retreat to the sofa.

My desperate mother ordered me to take me to the yard and I didn't have the money to buy a gas mower, so I pushed the old, rattling reel mower away. .. It rusted and didn't mow as much as it did. For a very high mass of grass that our little lawn mower moaned, I knelt with a pair of hedge clippers — this was before the emergence of weed wackers — and the grass low enough high. A hand-cut lawn mower can roll it.

Adults, colleges, big city apartments brought breaks from the lawn, and I spent those carefree years in the concrete world. Then the marriage came. The grass has returned to my life.

My wife and I rented a small cottage in Richmond next to my parents' farm. Both our place and my place in law were filled with large lawns and hay. Fields and orchards that needed care.

This is where my lawn mowing life began. My father-in-law had a large sitting mower, and I loved how it softened everything on the road — the blackberry bushes that plagued the farm, the lawn after flowering. A lump of dead daffodils stalks that spewed out in, a willow and cottonwood volunteers that jumped out like a spear along the edge of a private road.

There are apple, pear and walnut trees in the orchard, and when fruits and nuts were scattered on the ground in the fall, I drove between the trees — of rotten pears and apple meat. A mower that spews out damp spouts, a walnut still wrapped in a green shell the size of a golf ball, slammed into a fence or annex, terrorizing the horse that my horse-in-law had. I was shooting a bullet.

One summer, my wife and I hosted a company picnic for the staff at the Vancouver Sun News Room, pruning the baseball field and outfielders into the hayfield behind the in-law. rice field. It took 3 days. It was a hot summer, so I went out to the backfield with cold beer and wine on the day of the match. A piece of hay was playing with spots on the legs of his shoes and trousers. This day was like a printed matter of Currier & Ives, one of the Arcadia moments that urbanites rarely experience, and became known in family mythology as The Field of Dreams.

When the children arrived, we moved to a suburban location. There were only a few hundred square feet of lawn on the premises and it was quickly filled with flower fields. However, a feature of our neighborhood is the lack of sidewalks, the houses face the boulevard, and the city encouraged homeowners to plant trees through a civic program. Many have done so. However, when I moved to my house, the previous owner had paved the entire surface with asphalt, so I crushed it into small pieces, removed the contaminated soil with a truck, and planted a row of cherry blossom trees. Cherry blossoms bloom at the end of spring, and snowstorms of pink petals are scattered on the road.

For two years I tried to lay a carpet of wildflowers under a tree. This is a nice idea that turned out to be impossible. After sowing and re-sowing, mulching and fertilization, wildflowers refused to germinate. The trees thrived, but underneath was a bare earth with nothing growing.

I gave up and planted grass in the area. After a tremendous moon when nothing happened, a green blush appeared in the soil, and then a teenage mustache-like fine fluff.

I grew it. And grow. And grow. For some reason-I think it has something to do with my age-I love to see the green riots nodding under the trees. The tallest, heaviest, unruly cowrick-like stem of all is now past my knees.

I can't take myself to cut it.

I see it and imagine a small wilderness where garter snakes slip through and insects may find a home — perhaps, as we now know, the dire state of nature. Sensitivity born from. And what the whole uncut grass city looks like, the neatness of our collective obsession, the nature that regains the patchwork of the Earth that we bound it to. If we as a society abandoned the lawn, what would it bring us?

Now, I have longed for rudeness, let go, and refuted the orderly infertility of the lawn I have lived for a lifetime. As Walt Whitman wrote, we are all leaves of grass, and at my age, as I approached returning to Earth, I felt a relative to the uncut grass, as follows: I am thinking about it. Give back to the earth that raised me and let my scattered ashes help the leaves of those grasses to rise.

mcmartincharles@gmail.com 

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