ArcaMax

I don't burn sage because I want to purify my house. I burn cigars because they taste good. I like to burn them with a cup of black coffee or a glass of Irish whiskey.

I can box a little. I can ride a horse. I'm a fairly good shot.

So, right there, I get the serious, old-school manhood badge that so many guys cultivate with everything from camouflage pants to motorcycles.

In other words, I'm nobody's bouquet of roses, as my pop used to say.

But we've got this yard surrounding our house, and it might be making me into less of a man.

We used to live in a three-floor apartment house we owned, and we sold it because we were tired of being landlords.

We bought a house in the suburbs. It's one story, and no one else lives in it, and I can't hear my upstairs tenants flush their toilet at 3 a.m.

And I mow the yard. I've got a ridiculous, nearly all plastic electric lawn mower with a sewing machine motor in it, but it does the job if I've got the time.

My wife, Deborah, suggested that I leave a small area in the back yard un-mowed, kind of let it go back to nature. Apparently, there's some kind of "re-wild your yard" movement.

I'm not the kind of guy who puts grass seed and fertilizer down. Green stuff grows in my yard, and I mow it down, and that keeps happening until winter kills everything.

So, I left an area un-mowed, in the back.

It's not a big swath of nature. I can cross it in 20 paces or so, not at my longest stride, but not at my shortest, either.

On my front lawn, I see an occasional robin.

But in that un-mowed spot, there's a chubby groundhog, and I've seen two rabbits and dozens of bees working the clover that grows in that spot. I've seen butterflies and a couple of flying things I can't identify.

It's kind of like having an aquarium, but I don't have to buy one of those stupid ceramic castles to put in the thing. The grass is a little less than knee-high now, and I have life in it, life that isn't flocking to the parking lot of the chain drug store half a mile away.

And this makes me what? A bunny hugger? A hippie? A girl? A tree hugger?

It probably makes me a communist because every American is at risk of becoming a communist at any time unless he's walking down the street carrying an automatic weapon and picking his teeth with a bayonet. All the good stuff that was around in the 1950s, and it seems all we want back is the Red Scare, homophobia and segregation. We don't even want the beatniks back, probably because they were communists.

I've seen the grassland of Chase County, Kansas, and the cattle walking the land, and what I've got in my back yard is many, many times smaller. My only livestock is a groundhog, two rabbits and a bunch of bugs.

Yesterday, when the temperature was nudging 100 degrees, I took a Tupperware bowl outside and filled it from the garden hose. I set the bowl down among the tall grass in case anything furred or flying was thirsty.

"Just watering my livestock," I said to my wife as I came back into the house.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.