No Mow I

It's not that I hate to mow the lawn. I do. But I also think it's better to let the stuff grow. We have all this heat, and it was dry for a while, and I didn't want to cut off grass that was shading grass. We shouldn't have these crewcut turf lawns, acre on acre, that can only be serviced by bands of roving lawn guys with no mufflers. Let it grow longer. Let it seed itself. Let different colors of blooms contend.

The back part of the yard is slowly being returned to conditional ferality. With no cross-yard traffic from up the hill, it's less critical to keep a path mowed. I'd hoped that the fireflies might make a comeback here, like the year or two back there when I could see them IN MY OWN YARD. I've left undergrowth to grow under. I've shut off my lights--but that's a drop in a bucket of endlessly illuminated nocturnal existence. The fireflies don't stand a chance, even if the people I live among were to never pour another drop of RoundUp on their pool-table lawns ever again.

Noise is the side-product of it all. If I mow my lawn on Monday, the lawn guys might arrive before I'm done, or they may wait a whole hour before they descend to mow the two yards alongside ours and one of the ones across the street--same service, all three, and I think they HQ in a former firehouse, playing Euchre while they wait for the bell and sliding down a pole to race over here and run their motors. (Actually, I think one of them lives next door, based on the sound of the motor of his pickup, which he starts every morning before eight, and runs for ten minutes or so before getting back into it and pointedly revving it a few times, then he motors off. To the firehouse I mentioned before, which is v. important to my story.)