I Am Talking About My Yard

I am at the age where I mow my lawn in two directions.

I begin by mowing my lawn in one direction — lengthwise, diagonal, it doesn’t matter — and then I take a break to toddle around a bit while the grass acclimates to its new height. About 20 minutes later, I return, mowing my lawn in a different and often perpendicular direction.

This has led to a fair bit of ridicule from my family, which I have taken in stride because I know I’m doing the right thing. I know that my lawn is not just a singular slab of earth, but a complex ecosystem.

And that’s why that little 20-minute time gap is important. If you have a lawn, you know that there are two entities at play: the lawn as a collective whole, and the individual blades of grass within that collective whole. We treat the collective whole with the hope that each individual blade of grass understands its part, but we know that after a bit, the blades of grass that ducked out of the way are going to pop back up again. (They can’t help it, they’re thirsty for the attention.)

So you give the grass a bit of false hope. You let it straighten back out, and then you run by again. A different angle, this time, as if you’re trying to catch the stragglers off guard. By the second run-through, your lawn is level; the deed is done, and the clippings are left to help redistribute nutrients across the yard, preventing weeds and promoting growth. It’s the nitrogen cycle, baby, and it’s working for all of us.

This is how lawns work. It’s also how streets work, and public facilities. This is how the stuff inside our fridges work, and our homes in general. This is how systems work: entropy comes for any complex system, and it is only curbed by constant maintenance and oversight. And, it’s impossible to stop — at some point, in every man-made system, interlopers are introduced. The second something is built is the second the land attempts to reclaim it, whether that is ongoing decay or unchecked growth. Our jobs shift from building to maintaining, and that maintenance is maybe more important than the original build ever could be. If we slip — if we let up for even a second — foreign actors will attempt to reshape your slowly disintegrating order into its own form of chaos.

I’m talking about my yard, of course.

I have to apologize — this entire thing so far has made it sound like I know what I’m doing. I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t want you to think I’m good at this. I cannot make this clearer: I do not care about the quality of the lawn. Our lawn is a mashup of what I can only imagine is dozens of different strains of grass, including weeds. Despite any efforts to the contrary — pre-season weed treatment, periodic watering, new grass seed in the spots it needs it, over-seeding in the spots it doesn’t — our lawn is still a calico field of green. It’s genetically diverse, and it’s doing its best.

And so I maintain it. I have to — it’s the only way I can keep up with what my lawn wants to do, which is to give in to the easy move. My lawn is perfectly fine, apparently, for some reason, letting the weeds take over and hope there’s enough sun left to go around.

I’ve been reminded a lot lately of the idea of a “practice,” of doing something regularly and purposefully for the sake of doing rather than "completing.” Yardwork is not a project or a chore — it’s a practice, because we can never really be done. The lawn continues to grow, the weeds continue to creep in. Age is a natural progression, and it affects everything. Trees die and break down. Perennials sag under the weight of their long-passed blooms. We prune and we snip and we trim with the explicit understanding that we’ll need to do it again — next week, next month, next year.

We commit to this practice because we understand the alternative: it’s much harder to claw back when invasive species have taken root. When the rot has fully set in. So we stay vigilant. It will often feel like work. It will often feel unimportant, as if we’re not making a difference.

There are very few things in life that we can control. Despite the work we do to trim and maintain our spaces, we do not control them.

And that’s kind of the thing, isn’t it? Noxious weeds don’t disappear — they lay dormant, waiting for a chance to bloom. With the right environment and the right set of circumstances, they will always show up again. This is just the nature of complexity — no matter how hard you try, your ecosystem is going to have assholes. Crabgrass, stinging nettle, nazis. We cannot stop this, and we cannot help it. Our goal is to minimize these issues. To build a strong enough — yes, literal — grassroots network to choke out the pests. Keep them from spreading. Keep them from gaining any ground.

So this is why I mow in two directions. It’s one way I can beat back the hoards, one way I can try to exact a little bit of control. It’s helped me navigate the inevitability — but not the hopelessness — of invasive assholes. Knowing that, if I let up, they’ll all sprout up again.

Thoughtful maintenance is as much an act of protest as anything else. Don’t let the fuckers win. Don’t let the weeds take over. And if they do, start thinking about what the more drastic measures might look like.

In my yard, that is. I’m very naturally and normally talking about my yard.