Did you ever read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Ever see Natalie Wood—not to mention whoever was playing that “other kind of girl” skinny-dipping in the waterfall with Warren Beatty—in Splendor in the Grass? Ever hear Roger Miller sing “Green Green Grass of Home”? And how about Emily Dickinson’s snake, “narrow fellow in the grass” that “wrinkled and was gone”? Don’t you wish you could have moved like that on a football field?

There were unpoisonous and enjoyable snakes in the Middle Georgia grass when I was a boy. You could lie flat, get down to grassroots level, and see a world of things crawling and hopping. You know how you can pick a clover blossom, and bend the stalk around in such a way that when you pull on the stalk it sends the blossom head shooting off like a projectile? And how you can hold a blade of grass between your thumbs and blow on it to make it sound sort of like a woodwind reed? Can children find such innocent fun in a zucchini patch?

The downside was, I had to cut the grass. That’s what we said, “cut the grass,” which is more down-to-earth than “mow the lawn.” And I did it, first with a push mower (which made a beautiful noise, until you hit a stick or a pinecone or something and it clogged, schlrrrr-vhrrrr-wrrr-GRLK). And then I did it with a power mower that you still had to push; it didn’t have any drive, and I cranked and cranked and kicked and flooded and cursed that surly indifferent thing until it would start, and I dragged that snarling grass-clump-spitting thing up and down the hill of our front yard, and at one time or another I came within a hair’s breadth of reducing every one of my young appendages to a nub.

But it was a lot less trouble than growing vegetables. Oh, I guess if you had an asparagus lawn, you wouldn’t have to keep it mowed—the deer would do it for you. And you could keep a little patch of grass in the house, as some do in big cities, for your cat. I wouldn’t want to live like that. And neither would any cat I’ve ever had.