After a pair of exceptionally rainy years, we’ve been doubling down on overdue groundskeeping throughout Rosslyn’s trails and meadows. Tractor brush hogging and walk-behind brush hogging, culvert installation with the backhoe, filling and grading flooded ruts with the loader, cutting back overzealous saplings, and restoring order and harmony in time for winter snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.
Meadow maintenance
and trail maintenance
are seasonal
singalongs,
ongoing, ongoing
except, except
when soggy soil
and swampy ruts,
swollen stream
and windfall trees
delay and
postpone.
Wildflowers
and waist-high hay
weave labyrinthine
tales and tapestries,
thickets thicken, and
blackberry brambles
braid barriers
beautiful but
tangled and thorny.
Alleys and avenues
are reabsorbed
into the understory;
meadows are embraced
by buckthorn and
honeysuckle
unraveling
from hedges.
Two spring-summer-falls
come and go, come and go;
precipitation and
germination and
a courtship as wild
and unruly as
wind painting paisleys
scatters borders and
blurs boundaries and
unhusbands hems,
once hard earned
but now neglected.
Day after day,
week after week,
mowing, re-mowing,
finding, refining,
turning and tuning,
tailoring,
tractoring,
chainsawing,
lopping and pruning,
meadowing and
meandering,…
Progress is plodding
but productive,
improvement
incremental,
slow and steady
as once again
meadows emerge,
trails between trees
twist and turn,
story and understory
sing sylvan duets,
and free flowing fields
make melodies,
mellifluous
melodies.
From muddy ruts to mellifluous melodies, today’s lyric riff is dedicated to Tony, Glen, and Cole. Your meadow maintenance (and trail maintenance!) is hugely appreciated. I can’t wait for snowfall so that we can begin snowshoeing and cross-country skiing! Thank you.
What do you think?