The Wild Places

A few months ago I moved to a little house in Falls Church, VA along with two others. We love the little cracker-box that it is, sitting on a good sized yard with two giant maples arching across the backyard. The Lord orchestrated the timing of our move and our temperaments beautifully, as a conductor who keeps perfect time and knows each instruments’ part.

We loved the little house and called it “The Greenhouse” soon after moving in. It’s a place with loads of light, countless plants in pots inside and out. There is a general atmosphere of life, growth, and lots of green. We're all doing some growing.

Spring came, and one housekeeping need quickly became apparent: we needed a lawnmower. Desperately. Our generous neighbor across the street mowed the front yard (and continues to, graciously, despite our protests that we’re working on getting a mower as soon as possible) on a weekly basis—mostly from the goodness of his heart, and perhaps partly so he doesn’t have to stare at a gangly yard across the street.

It looked great- all trim and green with zinnias sprouting and window boxes blooming from a welcoming front porch. Totally tidy and well-kept. However, after weeks of rain, sun, and negligence to purchase a mower due to busyness and weekends away, the backyard became a small prairie. I think of it as a wildlife preserve. The grass quickly grew from knee-high to waist-high seemingly overnight.

I began the search for someone equipped with the heavy-duty tools to tackle that backyard. I spoke with a gentleman and his lawn crew who were working on a neighbor’s yard.

I remember the unlatching of the gate and swinging it wide open to show the wilderness habitat we had unknowingly fostered…then shutting it, as if our pet dragon lay sleeping there. We couldn’t let the neighbors know what was hiding there. Dangerous. Wild. Untamed. And certainly unsightly.

“That will take a while,” he said in his thick Spanish accent, before naming his price.

We ended up employing a different neighbor across the street—a guy recommended to us who cut grass from time to time when he wasn’t growing his dreds out or stocking shelves at Whole Foods.

This episode, shallow and mundane as it seemed, had a shadow-side that followed me around begging me to pay attention. What was I supposed to learn from this besides the obvious lesson in lawn-care? To keep it up.

What are my own wild places? Where has the grass grown too tall from neglect? What do I keep hidden behind tall fences and gates latched tight too long? In what ways do I keep things pretty out front for others to admire while elsewhere things are unruly beyond my control? Whatever you do, don't set foot in my mosquito-ridden backyard. It will eat you alive. I am so quick to suppress, to latch the gate and turn a blind-eye to my internal wreckage.

This spring I opened the gate to the wild places:

Pride. Some sense of elitism. Fear. Discontent. Some apathy mingled in. (Cringe.) So much I do not care to expose.

But the truth remains that nothing is so far gone that it cannot be redeemed.

It is possible that overgrown backyards may be, to quote lines from an Amy Imbody poem,

“transformed, redeemed-
to be some higher, holier thing
than it had seemed.”