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Wild Garden

© Joe Jeskiewicz

While the rains and weather in general has kept me from mowing my grass for a couple of weeks it doesn't mean I'm lazy about my yard. I rather enjoy mowing the lawn and the time I spend walking in large circles and constructing geometric patterns until all the tall grass disappears gives me the time to think about almost anything.

I think about how to deal with a dog that doesn't want to housebreak. I think about the best way to build a front porch and creative alternatives in construction. I think about making it rich and famous and travelling around to schools to teach classes on creativity in art. I like to sing songs from musicals because the rumble of the mower will hide my mistakes. But while I'm mowing I must still pay attention not to run over large rocks or go in a ditch.

I also have to watch carefully my wild garden. My wild garden is a great source of creative imaging for me. It is straight out behind my house from my bedroom window, a good 30 feet away. It started as the fire pit of the previous owners of the house and rather than clean it up, I let it stay in the idea that I might someday want to have a cookout with hotdogs and smores. Alas the cookout never came and I began to throw random bits of yard junk in this little area including a couple large shrubs I pulled away from the front of house. After about a year it started looking like a plant graveyard with dead shrub branches clawing thickly in every direction.

After the shrubs and a few bags of grass from the lawnmower I stopped using it as my personal dumping grounds and started depositing things further out into the woods. The ghastly sculptural fixture of my backyard however remained. And to make matters worse I stopped mowing the grass past that point. So for a year the grass and weeds merged with this so-called wild garden and it was just the ugly beginning of an ugly backyard. I have a good excuse however, lawnmower was extremely weak and I have no weed-eater. So I let the backyard fester.

Finally early this year I started cutting a path back to the woods once again and widening it every time I cut the grass. But I was aware of this pit of despair that I piled up and mowed around it. Eventually I got half the back yard mown down and looking good once again except for this rubbish pile, only by this time the rubbish pile had taken on a different quality.

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