The ditch

We are thinking about not mowing the ditch in front of our house. Its steep sides make it frightening to mow, and my mother-in-law is concerned that the mower will tip and squash one of us. I hate mowing for both environmental and practical reasons, and I like the idea of planting wildflower seeds along that ditch, making it a haven for bees and butterflies. However, nobody along our busy street lets their ditch go wild. People put great time and energy into making sure that their ditches looks smooth and green, right up to the road. Most folks mow just in front of their yards, but some, like our two closest neighbors, keep their ditches clipped in long for swaths along the road.

As I try to understand what manicured ditches mean to people, I feel like I am trying to understand a foreign language, like attempting to decode the baffling implications of clothes and hairstyles. It seems to me that mowing is a way of presenting oneself to the community as somebody who works hard, who cares about the world, and who was generally not falling too far behind in life. If we were to stop mowing the ditch, I worry that this would be interpreted as a lack of care and organization. I'm even more afraid that people would see the wild looking ditch and think that we're hippies from the city, which certainly has a grain of truth to it. I do not want anyone to look at our house and decide that we do not belong in this community.

In Minneapolis, I would've felt fine about doing something different from the folks around me. In the country though, the house and the land around it do not feel like they are completely mine. Instead, they belong, in part, to the community. When we run into people who have lived in the area for a long time, they know our home. “Oh, the green house!” they exclaim, and then go on to describe other families they have lived there or comment on the changes that we have made. They comment on our chickens and notice some bushes that we have planted. They ask about the new cars parked in the driveway. This house has been a character in their lives for decades, and they feel friendly sense of ownership about it.

They remind me of the truth. This house is been standing here for 110 years, and many families have come and gone during that time. The community and the farmland that surround it have been here for even longer, and before that was the woods, and other communities of people. We are just an afterthought, and even if we live here until we die, the house may still be standing to receive another family. Although we own it, and I am very grateful to own it, the place will never be completely ours.

A person could look at this with an environmental point of view and come to the same conclusion about not fully owning the place. Looking from that point of view, it is our job to spend a short time on earth nurturing the natural communities that sustain us and include us. One very small way of doing that might be to stop mowing the ditch.

In reality, the ditch is only a very small part of our enormous, mowed yard. One neighbor suggested laughingly that we get some sheep, but I think he was only partially kidding. That sounds like fun, and I don't think it would evoke the same shock and disapproval as a wildflower garden in the ditch. But like so many other things, caring for sheep takes organization, money and work, and with the baby coming, I can't imagine getting around to it for at least another several years. God willing, we will still be here, and the house will still be here, and the land will still be here. God willing, the folks who have lived here the longest will still be around to comment on new sheep.