Life in the Overlap

On creating, celebrating, and questioning boundaries

Before I remember about No Mow May, we’ve mown the yard into a semi-circle of cut grass. At the edges, garlic mustard, white violets, and the shy lavender heads of creeping Charlie stand in tangles. We have made an unmistakeable boundary with our machine.

It took twenty minutes to do it, but before that, we spent three separate evenings trying to get the mower going for the first mow of the season. Even after we had brought it over to Willis Farm for a repair, where a man with a long white handlebar mustache lay on his belly and blew air into the engine, bringing it back to life — even then, it choked in our backyard and refused to start for us. Finally, with some cleverly placed duct tape, we got it going. And so the boundary between tame and wild was made, with great effort at first, and then with no effort at all, as the sharp hungry blades metabolized the long grass into mulch.

I am in the business of making boundaries these days. At a time when the boundary of myself is most permeable — as I encapsulate another human being, exchanging blood and nutrients in an indistinguishable flow of mine and theirs — I find I must mow a little protective circle around us. To conserve my energy, I cancel plans. To preserve the sense of calm needed for the immense task of labor ahead, I put up walls against the chaotic forces in my life. I more frequently say no. But I know there is only so much I can control, only so much I can manicure and trim. For this unborn being, soon the boundary of my body will dissolve, and then all will be wild.

Putting up boundaries can be empowering and crucial, but it can also feel sad. After a screaming-match phone call, I take space from my whirling dervish of a sister, then immediately feel the absence, a raw tug toward my only sibling. Separation can be a kind of artificial wilderness. We wander in the quiet whiteness of it.

In nature, where two ecological areas meet and intermingle, it’s called an ecotone. These are estuaries and mangroves where salt and fresh water mix, riparian areas where the woods run right into rivers, and grasslands where forest grades down into desert. Ecotones can be places of increased vulnerability — the word itself comes from the Greek for house (oikos) + tension (tonos) — as an abundance of flora and fauna competes for resources. But they’re also places of increased strength, buffer zones that offer protection, resilience against environmental threats, and the possibility of greater diversity. In the fertile bleed between these two spaces, entirely new species arise.

In other words, creating a boundary can eliminate tension, but it can also eliminate the opportunity for growth. Life thrives in the overlap.

There was a lot of tension in my house growing up. It buzzed like a swarm of bees around the flower of our familial love. There was the great wilt of my parents’ marriage, which ended one summer when I was fourteen, and the epic fights with my older sister, which stemmed in part from a six year age gap we never seemed able to bridge. I would flee the house and take to the brambles and thickets in the yard, where I’d build forts, leaving the confining bounds of one structure to create the protective shelter of another.

And then, from out of this clash of energy came songs and stories. I became a songwriter, I believe, partly as a reaction to all those disparate lives coming together in that one house. In solitude, I wrote and I wrote — but it was the convergence of us that was the generative force. Who I am today is, in large part, the product of our domestic ecotone.

Now I sit at the edge of the freshly cut grass, morning sun melting the chill from the air. A robin comes running into the bald half-moon of lawn like a scout. It dips its head low and charges forward, then pops up again and cranes its neck around before disappearing back over the border of clover. Is it reporting to the others of our delinquency? The idea behind No Mow May is that a shorn lawn removes important habitat and resources for emerging pollinators. Bees can’t feed at severed dandelion heads. Better, then, to abstain from manicuring during this pivotal pollinating moment, in order to encourage new growth. Let lawn and meadow mingle — at least for a month more. I wiggle my toes in the exposed dirt and feel a pang of regret.

When is it necessary to close ourselves off, I wonder, and when is it beneficial to remain porous? A border can be both balm and bomb, with the power to heal and to destroy. Boundary-making is a powerful magic, and I remind myself to use that magic wisely, as a witch would cast a spell from within a sacred circle.

Before bed, I text my sister a single red heart. She writes back with the same.