M. Beisenherz: Sorry, I’m here privately
Man’s addiction to the scent of freshly mown grass
© Illustration: Dieter Braun/stern
Wiese, why, why: At the turn of the year, our columnist dreams of fermenting smells and a robot named Franz.
By Mickey Beisenherz
No idea what you have planned for 2023, but: Best intentions are like everything that is done with intent – there is rarely anything positive that comes out of it.
Let’s talk about certainties. For example, the fact that the days are getting longer again. You just don’t notice it when it’s still as dark at eight as the soul of East Westphalian pig barons. And yet it gets better. It’s brightening up.
I’m longingly awaiting the smell of grass. By which I don’t mean unleashed potheads that Lauterbach let off the chain, but a real meadow. The lush green with which I associate so much lightness.
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of having a ride-on mower
Well, wait: wasn’t it exactly these 500 square meters that tormented me every Saturday as a 13-year-old? Week after week I mowed these wretched stalks. This tedious tracking, this stupid back and forth, and worst of all: lugging this collection bag to the compost heap, under the top layer of which it was so strangely hot and seething.
There wasn’t even any money for it because my parents were of the downright mistaken notion that as part of a community you can sometimes do things for free. crazy i know
What have I dreamed of these ride-on mowers, with which groundskeepers circle majestically over the stalks. On the other side there was our neighbor who was still pushing his mechanical prehistoric mower with difficulty in order to rake up the lawn afterwards. Sensationally impaired top managers pay a lot of money for something like that these days.
If I smell freshly mown lawn today, the scent beams me back to the time when life was still free and without a contract. This smell means departure and play. In all the obligations and duties, it is a freshly cut meadow that appeals to my childlike self. Few scents make me happier than this one.
He’s so timeless. It doesn’t matter whether you come out of a mowed meadow at the age of seven with a ball under your arm or at 47. On the stalks that mean the world, everyone is the same, regardless of whether they have herringbone parquet or laminate at home.
There were as many wild meadows as there are Rewe City branches today
Not a visit to my parents’ house doesn’t end with my brother and I flanking his sons in the backyard and practicing diving headers while my mom’s rhododendrons are just as threatened as they were then.
My childhood was shaped by more or less manicured green spaces. There were as many wild meadows as there are Rewe City branches today. Adventure zones broken only by trees or a few heavy stones, under which whole microcosms were located. In the back part of the garden, my grandfather had apple, plum and cherry trees, gigantic prehistoric giants, at the foot of which I built my Playmobil worlds.
The home garden as an Easter meadow. Bumblebees, from somewhere above the sound of a sports plane and three houses away a neighbor who is mowing the lawn for the first time of the year.
A job that a robotic lawnmower named Franz took over for my parents a long time ago. A name that the robot has earned because it circles around the square as lonely as Franz Beckenbauer did after winning the World Cup on a summer night in Rome.
That’s a lot more poetic than, let’s say, “Trimm Wiese”.