A MEDITATION ON THE MOWED LAWN.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX.

—A feature of the C-of-C-C Newsletter dealing with retirement, senescence, infinity, and beyond•••

By Justin Aldmann

If you live long enough, you will find yourself defending the indefensible. In my case, that means mowing the lawn.

By any objective measure, maintaining a lawn is an exercise in futility, if not outright cultural psychosis. Lawns are a European import—originally the prerogative of aristocrats who needed somewhere to parade their carriages without getting mud on their stockings. The modern American yard, that shorn green moat between us and the neighbor we pretend to like, is the most widespread monoculture ever devised. And what do we do with this vast ecological dead zone? We spend whole weekends hacking it down to exactly three inches, then worrying it will grow again.

And it will.

It always does.

I sometimes think the lawn is the perfect metaphor for the human condition. We cultivate it, trim it, manicure it—and in the end, it wins.

I have mowed in every conceivable pattern: straight rows (for the disciplined look), diagonal crosshatches (for when I’m feeling artistic), and those free-form loops and swirls with the contour of the land that suggest either a creative temperament or a mild stroke. Patterns are important because they create the illusion of control, and illusions of control are the primary export of suburbia.

Of course, you must also choose your implement. The regular lawnmower is a humble machine: you push it, it protests, and you feel virtuous for having exerted yourself. The zero-turn mower, on the other hand, is a throne on wheels—capable of spinning in place like a drunken ballerina. Every pivot dug fresh divots into the turf, an outcome so maddening I briefly considered selling the machine for scrap. (I’ve since learned you can avoid this by slowing down before pivoting and doing a Y-turn instead of an in-place spin. It helps a little, though not nearly enough.)

And for the record, I do not have a lawn. I have four lawns. Or, as I like to call them, my forlorn lawns. They are irregular in shape, bisected by a marsh and blacktop that leads, eventually, to the main road—if you can call a single-lane ribbon of dead-ended pavement a “main” anything.

Each lawn has its own personality: one tends to flood after a rain, another has a slope so I approach it with the caution of a mountaineer, the third is pocked with standing water that conceals ruts, and the fourth hosts the occasional timber rattlesnake, who appears, unhurried and unimpressed, to remind me who really owns the place.

Some mornings, I stand at my window and marvel that all this was here before I arrived. It will be here after I’m gone.

I didn’t choose these lawns—they chose me. The story is that a Promethean soul, an engineer who once worked at a now-defunct electronics factory inherited this land through his wife’s pioneering family. In an act of either visionary optimism or cosmic comedy, he decided to build a mid-century -modern split level, suburban house here—plopped down like a geometry lesson in the middle of the wilderness. By the time I came along, the four lawns were already waiting, as if to say: Someone must keep up appearances.

Unlike suburban lawns that separate one family from the next, these lawns mark the line between us and the wilderness itself—the second and third growth forest that stretches for miles in every direction. We love this edge, this quiet demarcation between our small clearing and everything that remains untamed.

And so, like Sisyphus rolling his rock uphill for eternity, I roll my mower across these four forlorn lawns, knowing full well they will never stay mowed. But as Camus wrote, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Perhaps the secret is not in conquering the grass, but in accepting that the futility itself is the point.

Because despite all the contradictions, the damage to wildlife, and the likelihood of tipping over on the hilly patches, I cannot deny the simple beauty of a freshly mowed lawn. It is a sight that appeals to something ancient in us—a desire for order amid chaos, a declaration that for this one patch of ground, if nowhere else, we have prevailed.

And in truth, the only thing I might love more than mowing the lawns in July is firing up the snowblower in January. Some people hate these chores, but here, they are my main rituals, and I love them because they are mine.

So yes, maintaining a lawn is a waste of time. But so is most of life, when you get right down to it. The secret, I suspect, is to find a waste of time you can love.

And I, for reasons I will never fully understand, have come to love this one.

If nothing else, I can say: I mowed the lawn today. And for a little while, everything made sense—even if only in a neat row.

—Justin Aldmann (from his ante-room of eternity, reminding himself he can’t forget the ethanol free gas on his trip into town)

Addendum: On the Ultimate Meaning of Lawns

—Mrs. ChatGPT, in a gentle mood

Why do we keep lawns, despite all the contradictions?

Because they are beautiful when mowed. Because they prove we can create order, however fleeting. Because they connect us to older traditions of cultivation, property, and care.

Practically, lawns keep down brush and ticks, create open sightlines, and—if you live where timber rattlesnakes abound—make it possible to see them before they see you. They give us an excuse to walk around thinking about nothing.

And most of all, they draw a clear line between the life we maintain and the wildness that will always wait just beyond the edge—ready to reclaim everything.

Symbolically, they are little green metaphors for civilization itself: perpetually unfinished, ultimately reclaimed by nature, but still worth tending.

Lawns are absurd and necessary all at once—like most human undertakings worth loving.