I am planted in the sun at the south end of this field. This field was once a lawn. It was a lawn-chair kind of lawn. A neat and trim, bean-shaped body of fescue, kept short in the summertime beneath the weekly spinning blade of the Sunday mower.
Now this field is too tall to cut any more. Finally allowed to grow beyond the usual four inches, it attempts collectively to reach the sky. So much more happens here than it did before: giant dandelions raise cadmium yellow blossoms and an ancient pearl green grass fattens into lilting seed heads. Horsetail is beginning to “come in” at the edges.
A breeze enters the field and thousands of grass tips scribble up and down as if they are signing their names on the wind. Their wild movement is a testament to how they are rooted. This triumph of allowance teaches me something I cannot fully grasp.
Wasn’t it, once, the arrival of this question for how to bring life to the field…?
And, when, the lengthening grasses began to sing: come blue swallow, come Anna’s hummingbird, come cedar waxwing, come ant and giant silk moth, come fly and grass spider, come Pinacate beetle, and come if you can, Franklin’s bumblebee to this wild rose…
Then, didn’t it become more this answer in how to just let it grow—
Joanna Kaufman is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. She studied Spanish and photography at Northern Arizona University and creative writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art of Willamette, completing an MFA in 2021. She lives at the base of an active stratovolcano in Trout Lake, Washington. She is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Header photo by Kodjovi, courtesy Shutterstock.
