In Paradise You Never Have to Mow The Lawn

The world’s great religions reference a cherished spot of earth from a time when the world was innocent.

Natural predators live in peace within these garden kingdoms, the lion lays down with the lamb, the air is clear, the water is pure, and Nature expresses herself in all her glorious profusion of color, scent, sound and touch of which She is capable.

Humans wander the sylvan paths that open before their feet rejoicing at the view and more or less glowing with their union with the oneness of it all.

I do not mean to draw you into to one of these knotty biblical questions that people argue over, but it is to be presumed that there is grass of the lawn variety surfacing the ground in this paradise, and since it is paradise, that it never needs to be mowed.

It does not jibe with the general paradisiac theme of this place that someone has to take time off from Consideration of the Perfect to near pull his arm from the socket revving up the mower he has had for ten years and is hoping against hope to coax another two summers out of.

The pleasures of The Contemplation of the Infinite are many, but the chugging, if uncertain, roar of a small gasoline-fired engine, similar to the sound, amplified, of a bulldog worrying over a sttip of beef jerkey, interrupts that Contemplation and undercuts the thematic unity of the image that you’re trying to project.

No, no, as both St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas nearly said on the few occasions when they touched upon these matters, whatever else you may say about these little spots of heaven – and after all, our mere mortal imaginations can only take us so far – you may say with some confidence that the lawn grass there somehow or other doesn’t rise to the level of needing to be cut.

Paradise indeed.

But we are not presented these images simply to dream away the day.

No, the point is take the lessons from these stories and apply them to our daily lives.

Any homeowner using the wits, however modest, that a Supreme Being gave him, wonders how he can get his hands on this variety of grass seed.

You do not hear much of it, I will say that. In fact you hear nothing of it.

By contrast I have heard of all the other varieties of grass seed. I hear about them all the time.

These seeds seem to compete to see which can more quickly and thickly overrun your lawn and set their sights on the roofline as a good height to shoot for in their growth patterns.

The radio and TV are full of ads for grass that grows thick and luscious, laying down a surface that more nearly resembles a plush green carpet than anything from the vegetable kingdom.

These same ads happily, madly some say, note the speed of growth of this grass, and its long growing season.

As if these are things to be proud of.

Or as if these are things that the homeowner wants, at least this homeowner.

Upon hearing and seeing these ads, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

For some of us the optimal rate of growth of grass can be checked off a multiple-choice survey as ‘none.’

I don’t want a stand of grass that grows fully, rapidly, thickly, abundantly, over an extended growing season.

I want what you might call anti-grass, which does none of those things.

Upon application in early spring – and I’m not wild about this application business either – I will count myself pleased with the result if the front and back yards have a small furze of green upon the brown dirt to them by early August. This is growth enough for me.

Past that time I will count on the extreme heat of the Midwest summer to kill it off completely.

If the owner has to resort to the metric micrometer system to measure the vertical gain of the typical blade of grass because an inch is just too large to deal with, that would be fine with me.

I have seen these pictures of people who live in the fine desert regions of the country, who have what I would call painted front and back lawns, painted green, ornamented with boulders native to the region and pools of colorful pebbles and scatterings of gravel.

They are to be commended for their ingenuity in these matters, but see, those boulders got there somehow. Someone had to drag that damned ornamental rock to the place and spread it around.

No, in its purest form, what this homeowner seeks is a lawn of pure dirt.

This is an unlikely occurrence however and for now I am already tired of cutting the grass and I haven’t even started this year.

It may be that I am still resting up from last year.