I love spring! And I especially love April in Victoria. Yesterday I mowed my backyard with my human powered push mower.
It is not as efficient as a gas mower, but it doesn’t smell like anything other than grass being cut –none of those gas mower
smells that invariably mix with the wonderful smell of new mown grass. And what a sweet heady scent that is! As I was walking
back and forth mowing the grass I remembered how much I wanted to have a yard when I was a child. I wanted a backyard where
I, too, could mow grass just like all my friends. Even then I loved the smell of new mown grass and the wonderful green color
of the grass before it was cut.
Mowing grass is a meditative act when it is accompanied by the snickety sound of a non-motorized mower. It gives me a chance
to think and almost like a goat chewing her cud, ruminate. I walk over the ground that I walked over a week before, notice
how things have changed and how they are the same. Last fall, the squirrels in our neighborhood began chewing the ends off
of the branches of the Scotch pine trees in the backyard and dropping them to the ground. As I mow, I stop to pick up new
bits they’ve dropped and wonder again why they ‘re doing this.
Then I begin to look at the buds of the lilac bushes and see how much they’ve grown in the past week and it brings me back
instantly to my childhood. I grew up in Lombard, IL, a town that prides itself on a park that has 200 varieties of lilacs
as well as 50 varieties of tulips called Lilacia Park.
The heady scents of lilacs filled the air the first couple of weeks of May as I walked to school past
the park or walked through it on the way home. Friends of mine had lilac bushes in their yards and would pick stems of blossoms
for me to take home to fill our apartment with the scent of the pale lavender, dark purple, and white blooms. The library
was at one end of the park; libraries and lilacs are forever connected in my mind.
As I finish one section of the backyard, I move to the triangular area that in a heavy rainstorm in the fall or witner
is often flooded. Flooded so much that some years, I’ve had to hook up a pump and a few garden hoses to drain the area so
the house won’t get flooded. The grass grows thick and lush here. A number of sparrows are flying back and forth across the
fence from my neighbors yard to mine and chattering to each other in the cedar tree as I mow this area. I smile and remember
my children’s early years watching the birds come to the feeders we had hanging up in various places in our yard. I mow over
the grass next to a spot where I planted eau de cologne mint as a ground cover under two rhododendron bushes. I love the smell
of this plant as the mower cuts down to a reasonable size those runners that have escaped into the grass. I usually cut some
to dry in July when it begins to flower and sew it into little sachet bags to stick under couch cushions.
I finish cutting the grass and put the mower away. I always sit in a lawn chair or the swing that hangs from a branch of
the big Gary oak tree in the backyard for a few minutes when I’m done to breathe in the smells and enjoy the sunshine and
blue sky. The grass looks like a soft, springy bed of green and I am so thankful that I now have a backyard where I, too,
can mow the grass.
