I begin mowing in May and generally end after the last leaves have fallen in autumn. I use a mower which I’m slowly beating to death, a push gas powered doohickey. Since the terrain isn’t estate lawn flat, the wheels are usually the first to go. Right now the rear wheels are running slouch-wise, the left rear wheel rubbing against the metal base.
Most people have a simple grass yard they mow. A half hour to an hour and they are done. In rural areas mowing can be a time-consuming chore. I remember sitting at one party and hearing men talk about how many hours they mow each week. It’s not that bad here since our “yard” is mostly shaded. I have yard in quotes because there are actually several yards, or areas. Plus I’ve been mowing the yard of a house we have down in the hollow until the people we are renting it to move in. That yard is in full sun so mowing is done each week, just an hour or so.
My partner once counted the trees in our yard and came up with over 200 including saplings. It’s a big yard with our home and five outbuildings (two are small, three are large). There is also the old garden which we are slowly letting return to nature; there are two outbuildings on the north edge. The garden itself has another outbuilding. And there are also two roads I mow, maybe a quarter mile each with the same push mower. It’s a hike and since we’re in West Virginia it is not flat.
The yard, old garden, and roads are in shade and they have to be mowed about once a month until late summer and infrequently after that until I have leaves to deal with from all the trees. The new garden, a clearing in the forest that surrounds us, gets mowed more frequently since it’s in sun, about every two weeks until autumn.
The yard is mostly moss and mowing is just to keep the weeds down. There are a lot of wildflowers I dodge with the mower, bluets and may apples in early spring, wild orchids and ferns which pop up everywhere, Solomon seal and false Solomon seal, and all the hostas and daffodils we’ve planted over the years and are spreading on their own. Our yard is surrounded on four sides by a firebreak, the road being part of the firebreak. We often have bits of forest between the yard and firebreak so the yard includes the firebreak too.
Before mowing I have to go around the yard (and the roads) picking up sticks and tree limbs from all the trees. In autumn once leaves start to fall I rake and haul leaves to our compost piles. Some piles require unchopped leaves so I gather those before I use the mower to chop dried leaves to lessen the accumulation. I probably spend more time dealing with leaves in the yard than I spend all summer mowing. If we left the leaves the moss would disappear and we’d have to worry about the forest fire hazard in autumn and spring. Bad forest fires burned a small corner of our property in the eighties. We lived in another state and drove down to work on the fire lines then. We’d started building, had the shells of two outbuildings completed. That fire was hot, just the largest trees were left standing, topsoil was gone and just clay was left. The next spring that area was filled with young sassafras saplings, the forest regenerating itself. That’s a bit of history for us, a memory. Like the memory of a person on the fire line moving a turtle to the safe side of the firebreak. And the memory of walking through dense smoke in a burned area, trees still burning.
It’s forest here but wasn’t always. During the Civil War some men deserted from the Union troops who had a camp down in the hollow; the camp’s location can be seen noted on old maps as Yankee Camp. The men fell in love with women here and moved to the ridge where they cleared the forest for their homes and fields. The new garden is in one of those once cleared areas, a pine forest now changing to hardwood with large hickories. Before that War there were other inhabitants. We’ve found delicate bird points and other flint artifacts in our yard and nearby. A neighbor while showing us a spring down in the hollow to the west of our home told us as a kid old timers described hunting Indians like deer. That is something that should be remembered.
Another neighbor years ago talked about living in the hollow to the east of us and as a young girl would hear on Sundays people walking the ridges to church singing hymns.
The world is layered, history and memory, wilderness and not wilderness, and the things we barely see.
