Lawns

Andy Crouch writes about the "world" of "grass and dirt, worms and beetles, trees and fields" that children discover.  Or, at least the world they've been able to discover in generations past:

"The world is lost to many of our children, and to ourselves.  Even the "nature" that surrounds many of our homes is shallow in a technological way.  A typical suburban lawn depends on many technological devices, each of which makes something far easier than it was for previous generations: lawn mowers, pesticides and fertilizers, highly refined seed, and automatic sprinklers.  The lawn itself is a kind of outdoor technological device, composed of uniform green grass, kept crew-cut short, with little variety or difference.

He continues on the subject of lawns:

"A peasant family in the Middle Ages had none of this technologically uniform pleasantness.  They would not have had a lawn, or possibly even a yard.  Their children would have wandered out into meadows and perhaps the thin edges of forests.  A meadow has countless different species of grasses and other plants, plus flowers in the spring and summer, of different heights and habits.  If you pay attention, you cannot possibly get bored in a meadow.  It is all too easy to be bored on a lawn." (The Tech-Wise Family, 144-145)

I won't lie: my backyard lawn does not look good right now.  Is it ok that this passage made me feel better about that?!

Andy, if you want to see a lawn with countless different species of "grasses", come on over to my house!