Today Klara asked me if the grass minds that we walk on it. She would have really enjoyed more of her grandfather’s company because he’s the only person I ever knew who could understand this kind of concern.
The downside to being capable of deriving great joy from the most mundane things is that you personalize them and feel both the good and the bad more intensely.
Reminds me of the man from Mars in “Stranger in a Strange Land” who was appalled at the idea of walking on a living thing and had to be persuaded that the grass didn’t mind being walked on.
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The grass doesn’t mind. It thrives best when it is walked on and grazed by animals. Their hooves push carbon matter down to the soil where microbes can get at it and break it back down into usable nutrients, instead of becoming matted and blocking new growth, up on top. The animals’ excrement fertilizes the grass, and their grazing and trampling keeps the weeds, shrubs, and trees from taking over the grassland. People’s feet do this much less efficiently, and of course we don’t generally leave fertilizer behind, but we do some of the same jobs with mowers (instead of our teeth!).
But no, the grass doesn’t mind. And our enjoyment of the grass in the places where we walk is often what maintains space for the grass, in the absence of grazing animals. Otherwise it would revert to forest. Keeping that space open also keeps space open for rabbits, gophers, and all sorts of small critters that live among the grass, and in that top layer of soil that the grass maintains– it’s very alive in there!
“The grass doesn’t mind…”
Ah, methylethyl, what a beautiful two-paragraph fantasy about sentient lawns and fields!
Your excellent writing reminds me of a story I read decades ago called “The Craving Grave” — about an empty grave in a cemetery where it was mocked by its fellow graves because it contained no body.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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