Our house is built on a hill. On the downhill side spreads a meadow of several acres surrounded by depths or bands of old forest. In summer, when the foliage is full, we cannot see a neighbor; in winter, only a hint of house. Not a minute from the town road, we feel far from our kind – apart yet still a part.
During our score of years here we’ve done little with our meadow but let it grow, mowing it annually after frost. We’ve enjoyed watching it from our windows, flora and fauna. Deer, squirrel, turkey, chipmunks, looping hawk, vulture and smaller whizzing fliers have been regular, bear, badger, skunk, fox, woodchuck, and plodding tortoise, irregular visible visitors, but who can doubt the bustling society of worms, voles, snakes, insects, and other creatures intent on remaining unobserved? The appearance of the meadow differs with each glimpse, from verdant spring to jut-jawed November to implausible whiteness after snow. We’re particularly partial to – and sympathetic with – the goldenrods’ garish clamor before the hecatomb of frost, their heroic insistence on color till the last.
We seldom ventured into the meadow with no reason to. Nearby paths abound for easy walks. We’re too friable to bushwhack or sled. To wrestle the meadow into lawn would be both pompous and expensive. A friend suggested we could wangle a tax advantage by renting out our field for grazing or haying, but that would introduce commercial considerations into our pristine enclave. In Eden I doubt there were cash machines or nosey assessors, though it’s hard to know.
Henry changes our relation to our premises, as a dog is wont. This is his place too, which he guards – vigilantly! – and romps in – and pisses and poops in – and identifies as home. He also needs to be walked. Early on we’d walk the Appalachian or Rail Trail, but both of these required a car ride to get to – not far, but even so, ten minutes time two is twenty, times seven is more than two hours a week I might reclaim if we circumambulated our meadow instead. A stroll around our meadow occupies twenty minutes at a minimum, during which Henry races, chases and sniffs every which way while I amble sedately as befits my years. That we’re unlikely to encounter strangers on our walk makes this exertion more relaxing than a public airing: no suitable clothing required or readying of an amiable hello.
I look as I walk. On longer walks I listen to literature through ear-pods, but this circuit is too brief to demand diversion. Besides – the point of these paragraphs – my path, while always the same, differs with each repetition. The forest to my left is, in Frost’s words, “lovely, dark, and deep,” while the variety and scale of the native grasses to my right dumbfounds, each with its habit, purpose, story. Some grasses, underground in March, have sprouted taller than I. One can watch them tangle, entwine, compete for light. Each has its flower, too tiny or fleeting perhaps for a formal garden, yet exquisite in its perfection and stubborn in its insistence on being beheld. I Googled native grasses, and the names themselves – Achnatherum, Agrostis, Alopecurus, Antropogon, Bromus and so forth – evoke vast vistas of ignorance I will never probe.
Our meadow humbles and enriches me as utterly as the streets of ancient Rome during our years there. Granted, I am a dust mote to infinities, yet even so inspired and consoled. None of us amounts to much yet each participates in amplitude enough to irradiate countless lives.
If we only look.