It Could Be Worse

Across the Fence #246

Uff da, if it doesn’t rain pretty soon, my lawn will dry up, but it could be worse. I could be sitting here with a couple hundred acres of corn.

“You’re from the Midwest, aren’t you?” she said.

“How did you know?” I said.

“Your accent for one thing, and, you just said, ‘It could be worse.’ No matter how tough things are, you Midwesterners take whatever comes, smile, shrug your shoulders, and say, ‘It could be worse!”

“Ya, you betcha, I guess we do tend to say that when the going gets tough, like not getting any rain. No matter how bad things look, it could always be worse.”

Last year I spent many hours trying to get our lawn started. It went from a sea of mud to green grass that needed mowing toward the end of the summer. It was nice to have grass, even if it had lots of weeds too.

I never gave grass much thought when I was young. For those of you who came of age during the 60’s and 70’s, I’m not talking about that grass or weed. I’m talking about good old-fashioned lawn grass. The kind you’ve got to cut each week.

When I was growing up on this farm, we cut our whole lawn with a push mower, the kind without a motor. It took a little longer and needed some muscle power, but we managed to do it with no expenditures of money for gas to run it.

Eventually Dad bought a power mower and our life was a little easier after that. We still had to push it, but the powered blades cut the grass.

When we lived in Madison, I had a power mower for our little lawn. I bought it used and it lasted for many years. When it finally gave up the ghost, I bought a non-powered push mower and went back to cutting grass the old-fashioned way. I was happy using my cheap, old mower, but my neighbors thought I’d lost a few screws.

Now we have a very large lawn. If I was going to mow it with that push mower, I’d spend the better part of a day. Granted, it would be good exercise, but I have lots of other things I’d rather be doing. Even a powered push mower would take several hours. So now I have a riding lawn mower, a John Deere of course. Is there any other kind of tractor, large or small? Sorry John, I know you’re partial to Fords, but since I’m the one mowing the lawn, a John Deere it is!

As I was bouncing along, cutting the grass last Saturday, I got to thinking about grass and mowing it. I came to the conclusion that this is a really dumb activity. Think about it. First we slave away trying to get a lawn started and the grass to grow. We water it, spend good money fertilizing it so it will grow better and faster, and then when we finally get a lawn full of grass… we mow it down! Now if we were going to bale it up and feed it to cattle, it would make some sense. But no! We just mow it down and let it lie there and rot. Some people bag up the cut grass and dump it in a compost pile, but you can only compost so much dead grass before you run out of room.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we only had to do this once a year, or even once a month, but no, we do it every week during the grass-growing season. But it could be worse. Grass growing season in the Midwest is only three months and seems to be getting shorter every year. The other nine months are snow shovel weather, not lawn mower weather. It could be worse.

Think about our obsession with grass for a moment. Not only do we spend great amounts of money to make it grow faster, thicker, and greener, but we also buy chemicals to kill all the weeds that interfere with its growth. Now everyone knows from experience, that if we just let the weeds grow, we wouldn’t have to spend a dollar on our lawns. They would continue to grow and prosper even if the rain refused to fall. Plus, most weeds are much prettier and more colorful than grass. Think of the dandelion. Have you ever seen a blade of grass look as colorful? And another thing, you can make wine out of dandelions. All you can do with grass is cut it.

And that’s another thing that bugs me. We spend all that money to get the grass to grow, and then we have to buy a mower to cut that grass. Have you priced a new riding lawn mower lately? We spend all that money to cut grass that we don’t even use for anything. That’s about as useful as teats on a boar hog! We are an interesting species, aren’t we?

I’ve decided that wild flowers are the answer to our grass obsession. I’m transplanting them in our backyard. Eventually they’ll take over the whole yard. Then I’ll sell my mower, sit on our deck with my coffee, and enjoy the view of all the colorful wildflowers and butterflies they attract. Yah, it could be worse, but that sounds pretty darn good to me.

I’ll be at Lena and Ole’s in Woodville for Uff da Days on Saturday, August 15th. Weather permitting, I’ll be at a table on the sidewalk in front of the store. I’ll have my books available, including the third one, Across the Fence: Back To the Country. Stop by and say hello.