The impetus for this project is, I guess, the fact that I’ve never been in charge of the maintenance of a lawn before. At least not as an adult. Every place that I’ve lived before now has been an apartment and usually surrounded by concrete and/or other buildings. When we moved into a comparatively massive, Neo-Gothic Victorian church in the Autumn of 2020, I think it’s safe to say that nearly every aspect of what I’ve come to understand as my homelife underwent a sudden and dramatic mutation. The realities of that are the subject of another story, but the particular aspect that pertains to the Ghost Sanctuary began to materialize when I agreed to the job of maintaining the church’s lawn.
The church we live in is on a hill. It was built in 1883 as the second of two chapels which stand side by side overlooking Mill Street on the South side of Troy, a small city in New York’s capital region, near Albany. Formally called Woodside Presbyterian Church, it was ordered to be built by Henry Burden, a civil war era iron magnate who made his fortune producing horse shoes and railroad spikes during the war, in tribute to the memory of his wife, Helen. You can find the whole story HERE.
It was immediately clear, once I became the person who could be seen mowing the very large, very slanted, very prominently visible lawn of our home, that people in the neighborhood have a lot of thoughts and feelings about not only lawns in general, but my particular lawn. The first several times I was out there toiling away trying to figure out how in the hell I was supposed to actually do this thing I’d apparently agreed to do, it felt like every middle aged male within a mile radius was involuntarily compelled to materialize and talk to/at me about the task at hand. Who had done it before, how they felt it should be done, the fact that it hadn’t been done for a particular period of time, the places they felt I was missing or was going to miss, etc. I found it both confusing and irritating to be honest, even though everyone was generally friendly. Why did they care? I don’t even care and it’s my lawn. I was only doing it because we’ll get fined if we don’t. But I’m clearly the outsider here, this is so much more their neighborhood than it is mine, and has been for generations. So I do my best to field their concerns.
That said: If you ask me, mowing lawns is a ridiculous waste of time, resources and green space. Why on earth would we insist upon close-cropped KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS when nearly every other conceivable option is both more interesting and more beneficial to the ecosystem? Not to mention the galaxy of products, gadgets and vehicles that exist to burn fuel and sow poison in service to this most boring and labor intensive of ground covers. It’s a truly American endeavor and I, for one, despise it. I try to mitigate my distaste for the whole concept by using only electric mowing devices and no pesticides or chemicals of any kind. But still, it’s the principle at work that goads me. And it doesn’t stop there because our lawn isn’t just a regular lawn, it’s about an acre of historically protected, often steeply sloped and groundhog-perforated land that terminates at the bottom in a rusty, cast iron trap of a fence upon which I’m fairly certain I’ll be discovered impaled some sweltering afternoon after having finally failed to catch myself from tripping while mowing.
One day, while complaining about all of this to some friends (as I can be heard doing from approximately April - October), I jokingly said that if I just marked out a big circle on the hill and made a sign that said “GHOST SANCTUARY” with an arrow pointing at it, nobody could argue with my refusal to mow within its border. See? It’s a GHOST SANCTUARY. Prove it isn’t. The next day was a mowing day and I found myself stuck on the idea. Once I was done, I got a drink and a sketchbook and put down some broad strokes.
