Grass
My mother became ill. A sky-high blood pressure, a stampeding heart, tingling limbs and her head hurt. She turned into a shadow of the active person she had been. The one who mowed my lawn every week when the grass got too tall and unruly according to her. The smell of fresh cut grass was her last connection to the land. The land she had known so well as a farmer.
I forgot about my grass. Visits to urgent care all hours of the night, my work, and phones calls to talk about what her family doctor and cardiologist had said ate up my day. They said:
‘You are healthy!’
“Do you have worries?”
“Nothing wrong with you, as far as we can see.”
She started to get sicker and sicker.
Oxycodone twice a day. I pushed for a neurological consult.
My grass grew, exploded was the better word. The moss I had battled with for years, and overran my grass yearly despite my best efforts, disappeared almost overnight. I stopped raking the moss from my lawn, I did not buy grass seed ‘for shadowy lawns’ anymore to revive my green expanse, the lime I used stayed in the shed, as did the green-and-red lawn mower.
An enormous grassy tussock erupted underneath the wood pigeon nest in the giant fir tree. In the sunny corner on the righthand side a patch of giant yellow dandelions emerged. I got a lumpy-bumpy lawn, as I had known as a child, rough and soft blades of grass with their reddish-tinged seed heads dancing in the wind. A plot interspersed with little patches of mint-green moss, like the fields our cows lived in before English ryegrass became the thing and biodiversity dropped as a result.
Then there was an operation. Brain tumour.
Now she asks:
“Shall I mow your lawn? I believe it’s time.”
Now I say:
“No, it’s fine. It can wait until June first …”
This second Spring I have more grass, more life, and less moss. Less is more.
Please leave your grass alone. Try it.
