I didn’t always hate grass.

I used to love it. When we first came to St. Peter’s Church Road, I even looked forward to mowing. Mowing was fun. I got to ride a tiny tractor. I got to visit every corner of the property without even having to walk. There were all kinds of unexpected views. Riding along the ridge next to the cemetery, I could look down on our neighbor’s dairy farm, a spectacular operation straight out of central casting. From the top of the meadow above our old farmhouse, I could see mountains all around, punctuated by lovely old church steeples. This was an old rider mower. It was slow. There was plenty of time to enjoy the scenery while I bounced along. I loved the look of pristine, freshly mown lanes against the backdrop of the mountains, the intense dark greens set off by the distant light blue.

I liked mowing so much that I once mowed our big wild pasture, much to the amusement of my neighbor up the hill. “You mowed all that field grass,” he asked, tilting his head at the neatly trimmed acres, “with that?”

I leaped to the defense of my humble mower, which I’d strained to the breaking point. “It was slow,” I admitted, “but it worked.”

“How long did it take you?” he asked.

“Oh, not too long,” I said. There was no way I was going to tell him the truth, which was that it had taken, oh, about eight hours.

“You know,” he said, “a real tractor with a mowing attachment could make short work of that field. There are farmers around who could use the hay.”

Hay! A practical use for grass. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

Where I grew up, in Washington, D.C., grass was purely decorative. There were no farms, other than the illegal indoor kind. A lawn was a pretty place for picnics. More than that, it was a quick way to size up one’s neighbors.

We used a manual, hand-push mower in our yard. Imagine that! A nearly silent, non-polluting way to cut your grass that harked back to the agricultural implements of old. I remember being mesmerized by the quiet snicker of those spiral blades.

Still, it was a happy day when my father brought home a filthy gas-guzzling Toro.

I never really made the connection between America’s lawncare obsession and its nostalgia for a lost agricultural heritage. I came from city folk. The out-of-doors was the enemy. Soil wasn’t soil, it was dirt. And thus dirty.

I understand it a bit better, now. Mowing, like fishing, is an impeccable excuse for losing one’s self in nature. 

I have a friend who grew up in Indiana farm country. He likes to talk about the crackpot theories that farmers develop, on account of all the brain-rattling hours they spend on tractors and in combines. I always thought he was exaggerating, but now I think I know what he was talking about. Sailing along on a rider mower, ears ringing, muscles jangling, I do tend to find my mind wandering.

A while ago, we upgraded to a sturdy, quasi-commercial zero-turn mower, which is much more practical for our property than the old lawn tractor. It’s a big timesaver, even if it has been known to get stuck in the mud every now and again…

Mowing is a lot less thoughtful these days. Less thoughtful, and more worrisome. When I’m in Baltimore, I find myself fretting about the weather. I’m constantly checking the forecast and planning around the rain. I’ve been known to make the long drive up to St. Peter’s Church Road for the sole purpose of mowing, worrying all the way. Will the grass be too wet to mow? Too thick? Have I been away too long?

Grass is a jealous mistress. You ignore her at your peril. You may return one weekend to find she’s gone completely wild on you. She’ll lure you into the extra thick stuff over the septic field and bog you down.

Zooming noisily back and forth in a haze of exhaust, one forgets that a lawn is a vast living organism. I’d like to close with a few lines by America’s greatest grass-lover—and most successful self-publisher—Walt Whitman, who chose Leaves of Grass for the title of his finest book of poems. He wrote these verses in the early 1850s, a decade before the Civil War, and a century before the civil rights movement.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord…

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white.

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I

receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 18 June 2009

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com