Spring with all the dandelions in bloom is making the unmowed yards like unsloped mountain meadows. Oh for rising mountain meadows and above the soaring sky! Above the grinning dandelion lawns, less limited the sky is less—and I think it is due to the lack of angle meeting to make it slant and soar.

* * *

With indefatigable toil the people of this country mow their lawns. Nothing wrong with grass, it’s just these people require so very much. Is it a piece of their aesthetic notions to love long, flat, green ground? No, they want space. A part of their satisfaction is to have long seas of grass around their island house. They hardly use their lawns, spending most of the walking on them when they follow after a small, roaring machine. One seldom sees them reading on their lawns, or walking up and down them barefoot or contemplating the unending finished work. The Mexicans and Hmong sit around outside, gather in large groups on lawn and driveway sometimes to drink, to hold a party. But the natives are not inclined to tread their lawns unless to mow them, or to move the sprinkler. Nor do they appear to enjoy the mowing but they cannot seem to be rid of their long, smooth lawns whose general purpose, it seems, is to give the lawn mowers a place to roar. Gardens? Very few, and mostly ancillary decoration to the generous swathes of grass. And if they want to be outdoors they like to build wooden frames above the ground on which to put their chairs, on which to go. The lawn in front they do not use: that is the public face. If they use any grass they use the grass behind their house and often fence it in.

They could have goats or sheep or cattle but they do not do that. And in the undecided suburbs it is probably not permitted. They have a mysterious use for plain and copious grass that is hard to apprehend, other than to measure a palpably long space between their neighbors and themselves, between the public road and the private house.