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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

I was mowing what passes for a front lawn yesterday and musing for the  
several hundredth time the why, when and future plan for said  
enterprise. With a year's worth of rain well behind us and more  
predicted, the green blades seem inspired to become something more  
than grass. Unable to resist watching the builder and his wife create  
the pole barn shop, this mowing was put off too long. I could easily  
have made hay. Don noted that I wasn't catching it for mulch and I  
replied that I would never get done if I stopped every round to empty  
the three catcher containers.

Nature keeps me well-supplied with humility.



THE RURAL LIFE
A Will of Their Own
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 16, 2008
Ten years ago, I planted a row of fruit trees on either side of the  
driveway — a couple of pear trees and four apple trees, all of them  
heirloom varieties. I’ve pruned the apples a few times since, but one  
of the pear trees got away from me. It is now 40 feet tall, and to  
harvest the fruit at the top I’d have to chop it down. I’m grateful to  
these trees for needing so little urging. They have known their  
business and gone about it.

I’ve written from time to time about the hapless trouble that’s  
overcome me here on this farm, the way the land so easily outwits me,  
the way my sense of time — conditioned, of course, by nonagrarian life  
— gets me into trouble again and again. I act as if mine is the only  
will that matters on the place, forgetting that everything that grows  
here has a will of its own.

There’s an old feeling that to live properly on the land you must be  
humble. That is one truth. Another is that you must be able to accept  
humiliation. Some days that’s easy enough, just a matter of  
acknowledging the limits of my time and ability. Other days, it leads  
me into serious trouble with myself. The land doesn’t have a  
conscience, but I do, and the land — and what I’ve done to it, or not  
done — is reflected in it.

This may just be a way of saying that fall is plainly coming, even  
though the farmers here are still just finishing the first cutting of  
hay. The conifers have done well this summer for the same reason the  
farmers are grumbling: plenty of rain. I have scarcely ever seen a  
rabbit on this place before, and yet here they are this summer, as if  
the rain had brought them. They huddle on the lawn, in the pasture,  
along the drive, as if someone had placed them there or they had grown  
up like mushrooms. They don’t seem to move. They appear and vanish  
without locomotion. It’s a good trick.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17sun4.html?em