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The Ides of June

I do not know if the month of June has its Ides, but if it does--and even if it does not--we are just past the middle of the month.  Events and weather beyond our control have made it impossible to get to our log house in Northeast Iowa, not far from where we used to live.  Over the years, we have pieced together about seven acres of the most useless, and perhaps therefore, a most lovely piece of hillside and gully, tree and grassland. 

Because it is a hillside, the two-story log house is entered on the second story, with what used to be the flat-land, first-story now our downstairs.  Everything has been "placed" at Saetre.  Everything has to fit the hillside and the trees.  What used to be a small knoll of a rocky field, now is perpetual grass, which the trees eyes greedily, trying to move in.  Canadian thistles leapfrog Minnesota to encamp where they are safest from herbicides. 

Saetre is a contrast of the cultivated with the wild:  that is its character.  We mow some of the grass, down the grassy lane, where we park, on a flat plane created for cars, and that part of the hillside adjacent to the log house that once was a tiny clearing reaching out from the Arneson cabin to the dry wash. 

When it happens that the Ides of June come, after a Springtime of persistent rains, the grass grows high; higher than anything in the experience of our gentrified lawn mower:  hip-high, chest-high.  The Canadian thistles are eight feet tall, where they settled into the grass;  tall, skinny, gangly, teenagers of weeds. 


It takes a very positive attitude toward life to believe that a lawn mower and an old codger can grind an eight foot thistle to submission, but I had all day, and I had beer.  I did not know, before I tried putting beer into the cup holder of a lawn tractor, how a small, one-cylinder motor can jiggle a can of beer into the stalest of swill within minutes.  It was all I could do to keep ahead of the vibrations.  But I am a positive person.

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