Springtime drudgery

So.  We're more than three weeks past the vernal equinox.  The Easter Bunny has come and gone.  Passover is past.  As is the Ramadan fast.  But, however you mark the beginning of summer, summer's still a long ways off.

So what comes next?  Ah, yes.  As the earth stirs, and new life springs up, we hear on the horizon the buzzing of the wily lawn mower.  Time for the first mowing of 2023.

My lawn, like my hair, had been getting increasingly shaggy the past couple of weeks.  But I always had a good excuse for not mowing.  Yet.  You simply don't mow while it's raining, and it's been raining or drizzling off and on almost every day since said equinox.

And when it hasn't been raining, the lawn has been drenched and boggy and unsuitable for mowing.  

But yesterday it was sunny.  Not real warm, but sunny.  And today it was a bit warmer, and still no rain.  But my little iPhone weather app predicted rain tomorrow, and off and on for the next week.  Good growing weather for grass.  Once before I kept telling myself that conditions weren't ideal for a first mow.  Let's wait until the grass was thoroughly dry, and until the air was comfortable for outdoorsy activities.  

I finally had to borrow a friend's weed-eater to cut down what had become a virtual hay field, before fine tuning the job with a mower.  Never again, I vowed.

And so, this afternoon -- as the sky remained mostly clear and the lawn dried off,  I did it.  Donned shorts and old tennis shoes.  Warmed up the old gas mower.  And tackled the lawn.  It was still a bit damp and clumpy, but mowing it was hardly a Herculean task.  One of those things you needlessly dread and put off, but find easy once undertaken.  And then kid yourself that this had indeed been a major accomplishment.

Grass lawns are odd.  They are pretty in the spring.  In the summer, around these parts, most of us let them turn dry and brown.  And in the fall, they regain their greenness after the first good rain, but look tired and bedraggled until the following spring.  In most of the country, they are a shameful waste of water, although that's rarely a problem around Seattle.  

But why do we plant a crop that grows rapidly, and then regularly hack it down to its roots?  I at least leave the cuttings to enrich the soil, but most of my neighbors dump their harvest into one of their several recycling bins to be hauled away by the city.

I would love to allow my small allotment of land to grow wild.  Trees and shrubs, growing without plan or discipline, with narrow paths leading into small clearings where I could go and ponder the clouds and nature's abundance and great philosophical issues on a warm summer day (yes, we have such in Seattle, but we don't like to talk about them to non-residents).  Let the blackberries return, offering up their abundant crops.  Make friends with the wandering deer and occasional bear.  (Well, racoons, maybe -- my lot is only 40 feet wide.)

Waldon Pond is my ideal landscape.  Not Versailles.