I NO LONGER WANT TO (JUST) KILL MY LAWN by A. G. Wilson

We’ve been letting the grass die for a long, long time. We thought it was righteous to kill our lawn, no water for this invader in the dust of a drought state. We didn’t use a mower either, only a scythe and snath we bought online. We used Youtube to learn how to curve it around our bodies in a silver flash of moon arc. 

But absence isn’t love, really. We killed the lawn and waited for nature to happen, but it didn’t, really. Violent weeds came up: thistles and stranglers and goats-heads burrowing in our socks. We got violations from the city and were ashamed to have people over with our brown hillocks piled with dead tufts. 

People scream so much about how we’re killing everything all the time and it kinda makes you feel hollow, squeezed out inside. I get alerts every day that the lawyers are fighting for the whales or the Arctic and I should too with my money. I watch videos of people making super gardens with no water and nice soundtracks and product placements for oils that’ll make your hair shiny. It all starts feeling like I’m sitting in a glass with the earth outside and me inside. But there’s not enough room to breathe without the earth. 

I want to be a part of the dirt. I want to be with it. I want to feed it and enrich it and use all the thousands of years of knowing it to help it. I won’t go back to the lawn, but I want more, not less. If I just walk into my house of shame and watch the dead grass out my window I’m still saying “that is you and this is me." What I want to say is “you and I together are each-other, your life is my life.” I sit in such shame all the time around not understanding even the simplest things: how do you make seeds grow? But I also know this is the most mysterious thing, each unfurling jade tendril is life, life, life!

For so long I didn’t want kids. Like the lawn, I wanted to kill my hopes inside of me. What a wretched, warming, blood-soaked world, I thought. But now I want to grow a garden and I want to grow a human. I want to hold something beyond despair. I have grown stronger, and I will dig with the smooth handle of my grandfather’s shovel. I will accept the responsibility of improving the soil. It is not arrogance to believe that we can make the world better. It is not wrong to prune a tree. It is not wrong to plant a seed and help it, help it, help it grow.

A.G. Wilson is a Colorado-based writer who runs across fields to follow geese as they leave and when they return.