From the time the weather breaks until it’s too cold to work up a sweat just walking, I trace the mowed boundaries of our property every couple weeks or so, watching as our little paradise changes with the turning earth. My husband does the mowing (I am intimidated by the enormous zero-turn riding machine he bought to manage our three acres of grass), and he does what the neighbors consider a sloppy job, leaving entire sections of the yard untouched to satisfy my need to watch grass swaying in the wind and to encourage our expanding daisy field, and mowing around odd clumps of flowers wherever and whenever he finds them so he can show us girls later and photograph them for our nature book if they are new finds. It is one of his most endearing traits. I love that he can look across our new spring yard thickly dotted with dandelions and purple violets, a vibrant Monet come to life, and decide not to mow yet because it’s just too pretty. Melt. Heart eyes. Warm, fuzzy feelings. My man appreciates nature as much as I do, and I feel that warmth and appreciation with him and for him whenever I come across a little clump of flowers and long grass. Currently, the flowers are white asters, early daisies, and a thick-stemmed yellow flower that he discovered is a type of ragweed or ragwort, I can’t remember which. Definitely a weed, but so perky and bright. I smile as I pass one.
My favorite pine by the pond is sprouting soft spikes of new growth that I brush with a gentle hand as I greet her in passing. Eyes moving ahead, I am saddened by the sight of a roughly shorn hillside between the pond and roadside ditch where, just a week ago, a thick patch of thistles was growing. This is not my husband’s work but that of our neighbor. She called me last summer quite distraught about the thistles we were allowing to grow just across the street (and a few hundred yards down) from her property. Apparently, she had had a memorable battle with thistles when her family first started a farm on that land, and did not want to repeat it. As unlikely as it was that our thistles would corrupt their garden several hundred yards downhill from the patch of invaders, she had been so upset that I had given her permission to obliterate it. After all, I was buying eggs from her, at her special “young family” rate, which was worth more than pretty purple thistles in bloom. She hadn’t mowed them last year though, and I was excited to see how much bigger the patch had grown. I suppose, perhaps, she had also noticed and was less excited. I pass the stubble strewn with cut strands drying in the sun, and spy a brilliant blue dragonfly flitting up from the long grass and out into the yard ahead of me. As quick as I notice it, two equally brilliant red-headed woodpeckers dart down from their nest in our black walnut tree and one of them catches the dragonfly. I watch with a pang, and also with admiration, as the hungry bird lands on a branch and proceeds to eat what had, just moments before, been a shimmering, ethereal creature of water and air. Nature, like all of life, is both brutal and beautiful: brutiful, as author and activist Glennon Doyle would say. There is no way to receive the natural world without accepting the bitter with the sweet. The birds need energy in order to raise their young, the dragonfly I startled into leaving the safety of the long grass was a convenient food source. That is neither their fault nor the dragonfly’s, it simply is. And yet…
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