A lawn presents itself as neutral: a green rectangle, a little civic halo around the house. But turfgrass is a settler technology, an imported aesthetic that turns land into a compliant surface and calls the result “natural.” The clipped edge is doing ideology in miniature.
I say this in a cardigan, with the sincerity of someone who has read too many planning documents and still believes a neighborhood can be otherwise. The lawn asks us to spend water, time, and money proving that our patch of earth is disciplined. It is a soft-power performance disguised as weekend maintenance.
There are other ways to share ground: native plantings, messy borders, gardens, shade, and the modest humility of letting a place be a place. We might consider that turfgrass is not a personality, and certainly not a moral achievement.
Deb forced this shared blog into being because apparently family conversation needed a public venue. Im grateful for the nudge, even when my brother Buck answers a footnote with a mower. The point is not to win the lawn argument; it is to notice what the lawn has been asking of us, and who gets to call those demands common sense.
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