The grass is always greener

I think every man needs a little bit of land to work. Mine happens to be a six-by-eight-foot red and gold rug.

It really ties the room together.

I sow my land every morning, dropping crumbs as I eat an Otis Spunkmeyer muffin from the C-Store.

Every night (or at least the ones when I’m not tired) I harvest my crop. My combine is a Shop-Vac.

Seeing the nice furrows as the nap of the carpet is raised by the vacuum is pleasing somehow to the ancient part of my brain.

That part wants me to plunge my fingers into the black loam of fields of wheat and corn, wants me to come down from the mountaintop of abstraction, which towers over the fields of the real and complex numbers. 

Yet my land produces as many fruits as the green of a golf course.

The annual yield of my very fashionable rug is on par with the other bald patches of earth called lawns, which grow nothing but a testimony to the staying power of the American dream aesthetic.

It’s a Kodak moment, as manufactured as plastic: white house, picket fence, boy and father tastefully arranged on the freshly cut yard playing catch.

What if we put all the energy and pride, resources and time that we spend on manicuring identically useless fields of short green plants into gardening?

Or instead maybe each subdivision could buy a flock of sheep and pay a shepherd to let them munch each yard in the neighborhood. The wool would make great socks.

At least then the grass would be something more than eye candy as we wait with the kids at the bus stop in an idling SUV.

It all sounds absurd. I’ve seen a woman vilified for turning a yard into a garden. She was called crazy for taking things too far.

But I say it is absurd to be able to forget that we exist only through a flow of energy from the sun into plants into our bodies. I say it is absurd to see land not as a holy means to harvest that energy but as a canvas to paint homogenous green landscapes.

The beauty of the land is in its power to produce life. Whether harnessed by humans or left to its own devices, the land will bring forth. The wilderness and cultivated land are equally beautiful.

But to pin the land down, force it into submission, clear the wilderness, just to plant grass? It is not tasteful landscaping. It is a profane affront.

And as the subdivisions spill out of suburbs into the countryside, as the McMansions tower over two-inch-tall monocultures, the land is devoured by the hope that your neighbor will envy your fertilized masterpiece and say, “their grass really is greener.”