The White Man's Retirement Program

My wife and I own two acres near Hot Springs, AR tucked into a nice little valley just about two miles from town. In the summer, the temperature is at least twenty degrees lower than in town because of all of the trees and grass and in the winter it never receives even half of the snow that falls on the major intersection only about a mile away. While the valley, which we've named Peaceful Valley, never receives nearly the amount of rain the city does, we get enough to have green grass and to sustain the many many trees which surround us as well as those that populate our two acres. I've had time to reflect on a lot of things since we bought our land, especially on the necessity of mowing grass.

I can't think of a single exercise that has any less value or purpose than grass mowing. It's right down there with improving land which in real estate means to strip a piece of land of all of it's flora, build something on it, then go back and plant grass, or put down mats of grass from grass farms, or to cover it with asphalt or concrete. Strip the land of Nature and all of its irregular shapes of bushes, plants, and trees, ridding the area of the shade as well as of the foliage that purifies the atmosphere, then recover it with square or rectangular boxes and smooth-shorn grass or flat untillable concrete or asphalt, man-made materials. Then the owner gets to buy a mower, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer--all of chemical origin--and goes about taking care of that lawn, and maybe some flower beds, for the rest of his ownership, maybe his life. It isn't enough to just accept what's there and work with it. It has to be stripped, burned, and/or buried. The the white man's plan dictates that he work on it in whatever spare time he may have.

We have trees and weeds around us. I mow the grass because my wife more or less demands it. But I hate the entire concept. If the Creator had wanted me to mow grass, I'd have been born with something on my body that would facilitate the activity or It would have created something else to mow the grass instead. It did neither. Man invented the concept and I believe it was very probably a rich white man. I'd like to find him and apply some retroactive birth control.

I was sitting on a bench in our yard looking at the woods around us and listening to the quiet. Yes, listening...to...the...quiet. I know that you in the cities don't really understand what that is with all of the traffic twenty-four hours a day and you electronic devices that cut you off from the real world not to mention things such as air conditioning and closed windows and doors. You can try to imagine, but I know you won't be able to, sitting quietly in the middle of the afternoon listening to a quiet so profound that total peace washes through you. That's what happened to me. Then I looked at the small area of the yard I'd mowed and I thought of the uselessness of the destruction of all of those plants and insects. Yes, there were many wonderful insects living among that wilderness of what you in the city would call weeds.

I wonder what the Indians did before the white man came with his retirement plan.