I have reached the point in summer when I am tired of mowing the lawn — tired of conducting routine maintenance across a landscape that is burned out, anemic and sloughing off space to various weeds and crabgrasses. It is not like pruning lilacs or weeding the vegetable garden, both of which can be restored, much as we can when dressed in a clean shirt after a cool swim. Mowing the lawn cuts it down to size, but changes nothing with respect to its general unruliness.
The lawn always looks promising when I fire up the machine in May, as if the limestone and organic fertilizer have finally succeeded in imbuing the favored grasses with the strength to persist against their more aggressive neighbors. But halfway through the summer, the walk around the yard pushing the mower is a forced march through sad neighborhoods in need of resources from outside — bags of lawn treatment which we won’t provide to our precious grasses living beside a pond. I should get over it. I had an uncle whose standard for his lawns was simply, “Just so it’s green.”
There is midsummer trouble elsewhere. It appears our Macoun apple tree has become the latest target of porcupines. In two weeks, they have thinned the canopy to half its former fullness. Yes, there is a fence around the tree. But some individual with admirable initiative decided to climb the fence, and there is no telling how many others were on hand for the demonstration. Fortunately, they seem to focus on one tree at a time, so the adjacent apple and the peach have been spared — for now. I have repointed the fence, driving in two additional stakes. I have placed solar-powered, overnight lights around the perimeter. I have hung Irish Spring soap — a hack someone shared years ago — from the branches. The area now smells like the inside of the Turo rent-a-car our son arrived in for a visit last week.
We have been cheek to jowl with porcupines this year. Funny how these things come and go. Last year, I’m not sure we saw one. Now, three or four evenings a week I run into one or two — the same one, or two, I imagine — while conducting my rounds with Huckleberry after dinner. After two trips to Concord to have quills removed, Huck seems to have lost his taste for porcupine. I kid you not, more than once this summer I have caught up with Huck standing nose-to-nose with one of the rodents around our raised beds. I call him off, and then escort the varmints off campus or up a tree, whichever comes first. A week ago, I ambled behind one youngster who detoured up the sad, dead oak in our field to the first convenient limb, maybe 70 feet off the ground. I stood beside him in the early going, trying to explain as he climbed past me at eye level that the effort was unnecessary. Just, please, walk home, wherever that is. And don’t chew on the raised beds. But you can’t reason with some animals. Porcupines especially.
Where reason has failed, we have a bounty of black-eyed Susans in our field that has come to our rescue at least once, during an intractable summer moment involving a toy truck and cup of backgammon dice under the uncompromising control of our 3-year-old grandson. I called on the flowers to placate his despairing 6-year-old brother. Together, we cut a handful to present to his grandmother, who beamed with delight.
I know what you’re thinking. Not every problem can be solved with flowers. Sometimes, we have to hope the answer is soap.