The Days Grow Shorter

The days grow shorter but the grass doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to balance, somehow. I know that eventually the grass will stop growing, will just stand there (or lie there if I don’t cut it), slowly turning brown, hiding itself until Spring calls on it again. Still, it seems that there should be some concomitant diminishing in size as well as swiftness. After all, we grow shorter as we age, so why not the grass?

We grow shorter, but our challenges and problems don’t. One would like to think that as we age, as we mature and then become "seniors," we’d earn more than to simply be discounted. Does it bother you (if you’re past 50) that society now categorizes you as something to be discounted? Somewhat like day-old bread, perhaps? Okay, the bread is still good the day after you buy it, even when you get it hot from the bakery oven (if you can still find bread that comes from a bakery rather than a tractor-trailer), but it won’t last forever, so maybe that isn’t quite the right simile for this line of thought, but I think you can see where I’m headed: if our days are shorter, so should be our concerns, distractions, problems. But it doesn’t happen that way.

Like the metaphorical grass, our concerns and problems continue to grow, weeds shoot up no matter how well we clear and cultivate, the grass grows tall, the weeds find purchase, and life (as we know it) goes on.

Years ago experimenters discovered how to limit the size of some crops by careful selection and breeding. Even animals can be bred to increase or decrease size. One hopes that somewhere there is a research protocol seeking ways to reduce the size of our problems.

I’ll take that discount, thank you very much.