Grasshoppers And Moths Fling Themselves In The Wrong Direction
Next year will be better, I say
You can’t pull on every thread at once or you’ll go insane. But I would like, in general, to live a life in which I do less violence.
I can’t answer the question of complicity for everyone but I do know how it makes me feel. To know what I am contributing to by paying taxes in this country, driving my car to work, mowing my lawn to avoid a blight ticket from the city.
Because I have to mow my lawn to avoid a blight ticket from the city. And if I don’t the neighbors or the city will just do it anyway. At least for now, until we can get a functioning pollinator garden set up, protect it and designate it as such. That will be great, long term. We’ve got a lot of space for it and a lot of ambitions for how good it will be. We want to replace most of the grass with clover. We want to plant long and thin, make highways for bees and butterflies.
For now I mow, as required. I watch a million grasshoppers and moths fling themselves in the wrong direction, away from my blade straight into the next place it will fall. I whack the flowers of purple clover and chicory and Queen Anne’s lace into oblivion and hope that maybe it will come out in the wash at the end of the season if I rake none of it away. It will improve the soil, maybe. Maybe make an adequate home for fireflies to overwinter, if I don’t rake the leaves either. Next year will be better, I say, and tell myself that my life is not a violent one.
I saw a monarch today bouncing from flower to flower and decided to leave that whole strip unmowed right in the middle of the lot. I can get away with this much, I know. Next year will be better, I say, and tell myself that my life is not a violent one.
The developer who lives across the street took down every tree on the seven lots adjacent to ours. He owns them, he can do this. Most of them were junk trees, trees that exist as weeds, like mulberry or cottonwood. Now all the birds settle in a single Chinese elm, itself junky and weedy. We stopped him from taking that one down since it mostly sits on our side of the line, or is so close to it that he can’t prove for sure that it’s on his. This only feels like a victory in the way that seeing a Democrat get elected does most of the time.
In my quest to reduce the tally of my violence I’ve recently started buying TofurkeyTM beer brats and chorizo. These taste pretty good, decent replacements for the real thing, and my dog, Orla, thinks so, too. In fact she begs for them, lays down right behind my legs as I cook them, driven insane by the smell in a way that I haven’t seen since the last time I seared some venison at home.
I still eat meat.
When I said lawn earlier I really meant orchard. Or at least that’s the plan. We got a pair of lots a few blocks from our house and I planted some pawpaw trees there. And a hazelnut, and a red osier dogwood. Someday apples, crabapples, cherries. Spicebush and blueberry bushes. A hobbit shed for writing in, a hugelkultur roof going right over the top of it.
All but two of the pawpaws are struggling. (A third, once my best sapling, clings to life as a stem—I failed to mow for two weeks and someone from the city came and did it for me, slicing my tree in half in the process.) The soil is mostly infill, added on top of two homes bulldozed into their own foundations as Detroit reeled from a series of financial cataclysms. It does not feel great that I am tending my garden atop what was once someone’s home. It does feel great to be on all fours, weeding and watering, improving the dirt and trying to give life to something beautiful.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
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