by Sonja Hakala

Lydie Talbot glared at the dry-as-a-bone sky as she finished her cup of tea. Dry, dry, dry, dry—she couldn’t remember such a dry summer.

Like every other gardener in Carding, she yearned to hear the drip-drip-drip of rain from her roof. Everyone felt the unnaturalness of it. Even the kids racing around on the beach at Half Moon Lake loving the sunshine, were unsettled by the summer’s aridity.

Lydie leaned forward to rest her elbows on her porch railing, and inspected the layers of newspaper and hay that covered the lawn that her late husband Tom laid down so long ago. Lydie respected grass, the master of persistence, but she couldn’t abide lawns, and she’d tussled with Tom over the sod he wanted to put in front of their house.

“What sense does it make to grow something just so you can cut so it can grow?” she’d asked.

While her Tom had been many things—kind and funny and handy—her man was not a gardener, and try as he might, he never understood his wife’s objection to his vision of a green expanse. “What’s the sense of planting things so you can weed them and worry over them and tend them just so you can cut them back in the fall so they can grow again?” he’d asked her in return.

The truth, Lydie finally realized, was that Tom wanted to buy an antique mower from his friend Elmore Tennyson, and he knew he couldn’t justify it unless they had a lawn. So after a lot of backing-and-forthing, Lydie and Tom compromised on a his-and-hers package—he got a lawn to mow in front of their cottage on Beach Road while she reigned in the backyard over squash, six colors of iris, tomatoes, bee balm, daffodils, beans, and anything else she could coax from the soil.

After Tom died, Lydie treated his lawn as some sort of shrine to her beloved, and even learned how to handle the mower so she could maintain the greenery just the way Tom liked it. But after half a decade of mowing, Lydie started chipping away at the edges of Tom’s lawn, planting garden phlox close to the house, and orange day lilies close to the road.

But the mix of intentional grass and flower beds wasn’t working for her any more. Lydie’s hands and hips just weren’t what they used to be, and she found her gardening forays shortened by joints plagued by the first intimations of arthritis. She now resented the perpetual stooping and squatting and kneeling made necessary by the grass’s insistence on growing into her gardens.

So after she finished her ourdoor chores last fall, Lydie took stock of her options, and decided that come spring, the grass had to go.

As her daughters Hillary and Amy pointed out, it was always what she’d  wanted to do anyway.

The Big Green Removal Project, as her kids dubbed it, started with stockpiling newspapers in Lydie’s garage over the winter, Then in early spring, she took delivery of 75 bales of mulch hay from Lee Tennyson that she stacked “just-so” along the edge of her driveway where they formed a shoulder-height wall. As soon as predictions of snow or freezing rain disappeared from the weather forecast on Dirt Road Radio, Lydie slipped into her favorite gardening boots, and started killing grass with layers of newspaper covered by hay.

“It’s educational, in a way,” she’d explained to her friend Edie Wolfe. “I keep finding stuff that I never read in the newspapers as I lay them out. Or stuff I meant to cut out but never did.”

Edie smiled. She’d always enjoyed Lydie’s perspective on life. “Doesn’t all that reading slow you down?”

Lydie nodded. “Yeah. But I’ve discovered the news loses its sting when you read it so long after it’s happened because now it’s history, not news. I think the lapse of time gives you perspective. I’ve always thought the comics and the crossword puzzle were the best parts anyway.”

But Lydie’s grass-replacement plans were made before the rain goddess decided to withhold her gift of water from Vermont, and her method of killing grass—covering it with a four-ply layer of newspaper over which she piled a thick layer of hay—needed water to achieve its maximum effect. Without rain, she was just creating a dust bowl.

Hence her doubts about the Big Green Removal Project.

She sighed, and opted to hold off on her second cup of tea until later. Grabbing her clippers, she marched to the furthest reaches of Tom’s lawn to a small peninsula under a stand of boxelders next to the brook that delineated the western edge of her property, a sliver of acreage that Lydie was returning to the wild.

The seasonal streamlet had long since been reduced to a wet ribbon but thanks to the dense shade of the trees, the peninsula had an entirely different ecosystem than the greater lawn. In spring, jacks-in-the-pulpit pushed their hooded heads up among the dead leaves along with painted trilliums and coltsfoot.

Lydie began to clip the unwanted grass, dropping it in a bucket by her side. She inched along, taking close note of the number of earthworms that silently glided out of the ground, and occasionally swatting at a gnat determined to land on her nose. She smoothed her hand over a thick patch of moss, and acknowledged the “chip-chip-chip” of a brown creeper that thought Lydie had no business on his side of the yard.

The sun rose higher, and the small air current that had cooled her face stopped. Lydie rocked back on her heels then leaned forward to clip just a little more. Finally, she stopped to spend time admiring the dusky pink of the Joe Pye weed that she’d nurtured close to the streamlet. She had a great admiration for plants that other gardeners called weeds because of their tenacity in the face of human ignorance. In her opinion, there was far more to learn from weeds than the most delicate rose.

She eased herself down on a large stump left behind by an ash, and turned to look at her progress. By her back-of-the-envelope thinking, Lydie was only a quarter of the way toward her goal of total lawn elimination. Even though she’d never voice it, she often wondered if she was being disloyal to her husband by taking away his beloved grass.

Sniffing loudly, she stared up at the hard, dry sky. “I hope you understand why you’re not here, Tom,” she whispered, “because I sure don’t.” Then she blinked, shook her head, and then blinked again, forcing herself to breathe slowly. Over time, her grief had softened into a persistent ache which Lydie figured was better than the take-your-breath-away pain of her first year of grief. But it never went away. 

She fingered the grass at the base of the tree stump, and realized that her dear Tom was still here. Like the grass, he would persist.

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The Carding Chronicles are short stories written by author Sonja Hakala about the Vermont town that no one can quite find on a map. They feature the characters in her four Carding novels.

The Carding books are available from Amazon and the Chronicles appear here, on this website, every Monday. Hope to see you next week.