Like Grass

Mowing season has begun. All around the house, noises are rising up. Lawnmowers and brush cutters awake from their hibernation. And boy, are they well-rested and ready to make a racket. First gentle hums, then threatening growls, finally ferocious roars.

As in Spring birds start to sing, humans burst into their song of infernal ruckus. The sound of machines assailing plants. The sound of “order!”

Living in a semi-rural area as I do, one cannot escape this. It’s the same every year. Throughout the neighborhood, people all of a sudden feel the irrepressible urge to mow their grass, trim their bushes, cut their hedges. It’s the first sight of vernal growth that rouses their instincts. The grass begins to lengthen beyond permissible proportion. The hedge, until last week still largely in the tidy rectangular shape from previous trimming rounds, is now acting out like an unruly adolescent. Shrubs need to be pushed back into their ball, square or heart shape. Order!

It’s the sound that first disturbs me, as I’m sitting quietly behind my desk, trying to do work, and there it suddenly is: rrrrroooooooaaaaarrrrrrr. Brush cutters are the worst, with their unpredictable intermittence: cutting — a violent rrwggooaarr! — then pausing — a low-humming dddddrrrddd — then cutting again… and so on. Sonic torture.

But the sound is only the harbinger, the external sign of a deeper unease. Right at this moment in the turning of the seasons, it becomes crystal clear how much we are cogs in the machinery — not the machinery of nature…