When Jayber Stopped Mowing the Lawn

Jayber Crow, the titular character of farmer and author Wendell Berry's novel, writes about ceasing to mow the lawn in his old age:

"For the first several years I was here, I kept a sort of yard cleared for some distance around the house, once a year scything down the nettles and wild grasses and elderberry bushes and seedling trees.  And I kept open a prospect on the river.  This suited me for a while and seemed the proper thing to do.  I loved the clarity and neatness my mowing and cutting made.  And then one year I stopped, not from laziness (though using a scythe on a hillside will produce sweat enough) but just to give room and welcome to whatever would come.  Since then I have mowed mainly my paths down to the river and across to the garden and up to the road and the woodpile and out to the privy.  When the trees send their branches too close, I cut them back to keep them from scraping the walls or banging on the roof.  The windfalls are big enough I saw up and split for stovewood.  Otherwise I let it be as it will.  Now, sitting out on the porch in the summer among the tops of the young trees, I am among the birds.  And in the last few years something wonderful has begun to happen.  Not just near the house but all along the hillside, the seedlings of the true forest have begun to come to the higher ground: sugar maples and hickories and chinquapin oaks.  Now that I am old, I talk to them, I talk to the birds, the way Athey Keith used to talk to the stray dogs and cats in his own exile up in Port William." (Berry, Jayber Crow 304)