Cutting Season

 Today doesn't feel like a Spring day. It is cloudy, windy, and cold. I don't think the temperature got about the low 40's. But the blossoms on our chimeric cherry tree are about gone, and the grass is growing. I should mow the lawn this weekend, despite the cold.

I don't like lawns much. They're all right when you play on them, but we don't. Since I read about the history of lawns, I totally lost interest in having one. They are an artifact of the French aristocracy from before the Revolution. A status symbol. I don't need a status symbol. I'd rather dispose of the lawn entirely, but I don't know if that's allowed in this community.

I also don't know what to replace the lawn with. That would take research, to see what is allowed and what is possible, and within a budget I would have to create. I suppose we could just plant so many trees in the yard that the lawn wouldn't grow for lack of light. It would take some time for trees to grow large enough to cause that much shade, but I'm not in a hurry, I guess.

I don't enjoy mowing the lawn anymore. I once did. As a kid, back in Nevada, I mowed the lawn for our chapel in the Indian Springs Branch, our congregation of the Mormon church. I understand that the current president of the Mormon church has said they should not be referred to as "Mormons" anymore. He is a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, the current mouthpiece for Heavenly Father on Earth, so his words should be taken seriously. By people who believe in his Heavenly Father, which is Mormons. But when I was young, maybe beginning when I was twelve, or a little younger, I started mowing the church lawn on their riding mower, which I thought was cool, and I would sing aloud as I drove the thing around and around the patches of lawn around the chapel.

The church there changed the landscaping sometime after I left Indian Spring, and now has a few trees, and no lawn, using a design that requires much less water. That is a good thing for a church in a very dry desert.

But here I have a lawn because I think it is required by the community, and I mow it to fit in. And I don't like it. I don't mind yard work, but I don't want to feel like I have to do it to fit in, or to try to make the place look nice. I don't care how my yard looks. Maybe I really should look up the rules, and see if I could change our yard into something more like the natural landscape of Central Ohio, whatever that would be like. Something that didn't require maintenance. That I think I would like.