by Russ Mullen   

The thumb came out from nowhere. A wet sloppy thumb. It landed on my left cheek just an inch from the corner of my mouth. I jerked right but a hand clamped on top of my head, fingers like a vise, held fast. The moistened thumb circled and circled, spreading saliva over the dried blob of egg yolk, making me wish I looked in the mirror just before we left for Sunday Mass. A fingernail started scraping my skin, and more rubbing. Mother’s armlock forced me to look upward toward her, her eyes fiercely intent on that yellow remnant of the morning’s breakfast. Mom’s intensity scared me -– the yoke remnant must be alive and invading my skin!

Before she released my neck, she leaned down and whispered, “Cleanliness is next to godliness, and we are in the house of the Lord.”

At that moment, I felt like we were in the bathroom of our house. Good Lord – her eyes narrowed, she licked her thumb a second time, and aimed for my cheek again! I tried to jerk away but I could feel the determination in her arm hold, and from the brief glimpse of her clenched jaw muscles. A voice told me to take it like a little boy, be still, and get over it before anyone could notice. Glancing past her and across the aisle, I saw three of my cousins stifling chuckles. Mom removed the egg spot and my masculine pride within a 30-second spit wash.

Well, Mom, we might be in the house of the Lord now, but it’s going to be 20 minutes of hell for me after Mass in the courtyard with my cousins, I wanted to tell her. Immediately, I changed the “hell” word to “heck” in my thoughts before God noticed. Mom had told me before that using “heck” was okay, but saying “hell” was cussing.

It was 1955, a cool spring Sunday, and the rush of getting to Sunday Mass was over.  Mom, my older sister, Sharon, and I were kneeling in church, finishing our pre-Mass prayers.  I was feeling proud of my recent growth phase, getting closer in height to my sister, but that wet thumb shattered my boyhood dignity.

Mom used the cleanliness-godliness phrase a lot over the years.  It was a rule that almost rose to the status of the Ten Commandments.  It was a statement rooted in history and the religious beliefs of many Christian and non-Christian religions, borne out of health concerns.  It’s linked to another proverb used in religious speak: “A healthy mind is a healthy body.”  

Control of infectious human diseases, like cholera, typhoid, scabies, ringworm, trachoma, head lice, intestinal worms, E. coli infections, bubonic plague, and smallpox depended on cleaning the body and the environment that promoted the disease.  Spiritual, physical, and emotional feelings toward cleanliness, coupled with pride, melded into an unquestioned principle that to be clean, is to be healthy. To be godly, we need to be clean.  And pride was the resulting motivation for those who practiced cleanliness the best.  It didn’t take long, as a young farm boy growing up in the 1950s, to realize that rural people were obsessed with cleanliness.  The “cleanliness addiction” started within the home, moved to the farmstead and later to the broader farm landscape.

At the home level, Mom cleaned something every day.  She washed and wrung clothes on our electric-motorized Maytag wringer washer.  This was one of her favorite appliances because the motor-driven rollers didn’t require hand cranking anymore to wring water out of the clothes.  Mom let us hang clothes on the clothesline but she didn’t let us go near the finger-smashing, arm-eating washing machine – it was a beast.  She pried the wet clothes out of the tub with a two-foot-long, wooden dowel and cautiously fed them into the wringer, like a zoo-worker feeding slices of meat on a stick to a Bengal tiger through a metal cage.  We didn’t have a machine dryer, so we sun-dried or freeze-dried clothes on the outside clothesline, depending on the season.  

She cleaned and vacuumed floors with another favorite appliance, an Electrolux vacuum cleaner.  It was a tube-like contraption attached to a removable hose that terminated in a bristled cleaning head.  From my perspective, Mom looked like she was pulling a leashed Dachshund around the room.  Mom dusted furniture, cleaned windows, vacuumed curtains, washed dishes, and kept the garden clean.  There was no doubt that Mom was an equal partner to Dad in our farm operation.   They complemented each other and worked long hours to keep our family and business healthy and viable.

At the farmstead level, Dad cleaned machinery, spades and other tools, the chicken house, the cattle lot, the hog house, the corn crib, the oat bin, and the barn.  Every chore seemed to require some degree of cleaning by one of us in the family: gathering the eggs – washing the eggs, harvesting seed – cleaning the seed, growing a crop – weeding the crop.

Cleaning often had a practical purpose other than feeding our pridefulness.  Clean clothes, house, utensils, and sanitary food preparation all contributed to personal health.  Cleaning the farmstead helped control mice, rats, possums, snakes, fox, and a variety of vermin from spreading disease and eating farm products like stored grain, eggs, and chickens.  Cleaning fields, buildings, and tools increased farm productivity.  But cleaning lawns on farmsteads wasn’t a high priority for mid-20^th century farmers – there were too many other things to do on a diversified farm.

Our first farmstead barely had a grass yard, more like a poorly managed lawn of weeds.  We didn’t even have a motorized lawnmower.  I never questioned why we began to mow the lawn – it was just part of this inherent cleanliness drive we had.  Mowing the lawn was physical, like getting a haircut from Mom.  You winced from all the little, painful snags from dull blades but in the end, it felt good to have a short , uniform cut and to get rid of the curls and snarls.

Our lawnmower was a hand-pushed, rotary-bladed, reel mower on wheels.  A three-foot long, two-inch square wooden shaft was attached to the metal frame.  A 16-inch long, two-fisted round handle was on the push end. The wheels had to move in order turn the cutting blades.  At 80 pounds, I was barely able to push it.  I leaned forward like I was steeling myself against hurricane force winds.  My legs, spread out in a sprinter’s stance, pushed forward, my arms extending the push and then my legs catching up to the mower.  The motion repeated itself – forward push, arms extending, legs catching up to the mower, sometimes grunting in rhythm with the pushing. 

I watched the mower blades snip off crabgrass heads, white clover, henbit, creeping Charlie, foxtails, and the occasional spots of green Kentucky bluegrass plants. The scattered patches of clean, green bluegrass leaves were easy to push through with uninterrupted motion.  The low hum and cadence of whirling blades were mesmerizing.  Thin, soft leaves flew upward from the cutting reel in layers, and floated downward in nice and neat rows.  The cut grass in thick patches of bluegrass looked and felt like a carpet under my bare feet.  

Pushing the rotary mower by hand was good exercise for a growing boy, but we had a lot of trees around the yard.  Those small, hard-to-see tree branches – buried under the plants – stopped forward momentum of the mower in a heartbeat when they lodged between the blades.  The sticks jammed the blades, locking the wheels.  The sudden stop was like running into the top bar of a short gate – leaning over, no give, sudden stop. The mower handle buried deep into my stomach just below the rib cage and I teeter-tottered on my toes for a moment.  It didn’t take long to figure out that keeping  arms and hands in front of you to act as shock absorbers helped cushion the blow.  

Dad brought a surprise home one Sunday in 1959 after we had moved to a rented farmhouse with a larger lawn and orchard.  The surprise was the result of a winning poker hand in five-card stud.  Dad enjoyed telling the story several times over the years, whenever we upgraded lawnmowers.  He’d give us a detailed rundown of the poker game each time he retold the story.

“It was late at night, when the whiskey and beer started making decisions on holding or throwing cards.  I drank ‘backpackers,’ a watered-down, lime-green and vodka-based fruity drink, to gain an advantage as the night wore on.  It was the last hand, so time was running out for the losers to recoup their losses.  Everyone was throwing money into the pot in hopes of winning the last hand. The pot was over $300 dollars when it came down to just me and ‘Mr. Fancy Pants,’ a blustery city slicker who thought highly of himself and liked to show his wealth in clothes, watches, and expensive boots.  I had two pairs showing, jacks and sixes.  Fancy Pants also had two pairs showing, queens and deuces.  He bet $20, which left him only $10 showing on the table in front of him.  So, I called and raised him $20.”

“I don’t have $20 in cash to call you.  I only have a ten.” Fancy Pants said.

“Well, are you saying you need to fold?”  Dad asked him.

Fancy Pants didn’t say anything.  He went to the bar, borrowed a pen, scribbled on a piece of paper, returned, and threw the paper into the pot.  Dad picked it up, read it, and nodded approval.  The note was signed and gave the winning person ownership of a gas-powered Lawn Boy mower that Fancy Pants had ordered through a Sears and Roebuck catalog.

“It’s only two years old and works great, but I don’t plan to lose it tonight,” Fancy Pants said. 

“After the dealer announced, ‘the pot’s right,’ we turned up our down card. I had a full house: three jacks and a pair of sixes. He had a full house too: three deuces and a pair of queens.  I picked up his lawnmower the next day,” Dad chuckled.

Thus, the hand-pushed, reel mower era in our family ended by a winning poker hand and we never looked back.  And, like all the neighbors, our lawn area grew over the years.  Why? Because mowed lawns look clean and nice, lawnmowers got bigger, and owners had the money to buy them.

Today, it seems, the size of lawnmowers grows faster than corn in the nation’s heartland.  The early motorized lawnmowers were hand-pushed, “walk-behinds,” about 20 inches in width.  They are still used in small, urban lots.  But like tractors, lawnmowers on farms and country estates grew in size, power, and luxury.  Today, lawnmowers are so big that you can mow close to four acres per hour.  Mowing decks are six feet and more in width.  The operator can sit in a thick-cushioned captain’s chair equipped with hydraulic shocks that remove the bumps and jolts from driving over uneven ground.  Some lawnmowers are air-conditioned.  Cup holders hold your drink of choice while you listen to your favorite music and enjoy the smell of freshly-cut green grass.

Mowing lawns has become so easy and enjoyable that nobody wants the lawn mowing period to end in just 30 minutes!  As a result, people increase their lawn size, buy bigger mowers, and start mowing road ditches, waterways – any place that prolongs the pleasure of mowing grass.  We embrace “recreational mowing” – a favorite pastime that feeds our “cleanliness is next to godliness” addiction.  There is another reason for mowing that originated from the 17^th century England.  A shorn or manicured lawn was a sign of wealth. Today, we still equate clean and manicured landscapes with wealth.  The sign is obvious – the more area you mow and manicure, the richer you are.  But the addiction didn’t end at the farm home and farmstead, it expanded to fields and eventually to the farm landscape, fueled by centuries of agricultural experience.

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Ancient farmers learned that crop seeds need clean seedbeds and firm seed-to-soil contact to germinate and establish strong seedlings.  A uniform stand of crop plants is critical for high grain yield.  Crop yields were much better when weeds were not allowed to grow and compete with crop plants during the growing season.  Wood and iron tools were used by the early immigrants in North America to prepare the country’s fertile lands for seeding and growing crops.

Farmers used primitive hand tools to remove established plants so that seeds could be planted directly into the soil.  The task was labor intensive and difficult, and fields reflected those challenges.  Fields were weedy, clumps of old plants and roots were left on the surface, and the soil surface was cloddy, bumpy, and uneven.  From a distance, fields looked unkempt, messy, and disorganized.  In addition to appearance, crop residues left in the field harbored insects, diseases, and weed seeds.  Old residues interfered with tillage, seeding, and controlling weeds by row cultivation the following year.  With all of the negative connotations associated with untidy fields, farmers in the 19^th and 20^th centuries started using the collective term “trash,” to refer to plant and weed material left in the field.

The agricultural dream of clean fields for planting and growing crops was boosted by the invention of the moldboard plow.  It allowed farmers to clean the soil surface for farming like never before.  President Thomas Jefferson, a farmer, drew out plans and cast a moldboard plow in the late 1700s and early 1800s.  The plow turned over and buried surface residue, leaving a clean soil surface, but Jefferson didn’t patent his idea.  His plow didn’t “scour” adequately in the heavy, fertile soils of the Midwest, resulting in soil sticking to the curved steel blade and preventing soil from being turned over properly.

A few years later, a blacksmith named John Deere made and patented a self-scouring moldboard out of polished steel that didn’t require farmers to continually scrape off the soil that was stuck to the moldboard.  John Deere’s plow and the transition from horse-powered to tractor-powered agriculture were the tools that annihilated the vast prairies of the U.S. and subjugated rural landscapes to intensive agriculture.

The use of the moldboard plow gave birth to the 200-year era of “clean” tillage systems in the U.S.  Using horsepower and later tractor power, moldboard plowing buried surface plant residues and secondary tillage smoothed the rough soil surface.  The result was a clean, smooth, garden-like soil surface for planting and growing crops.  Farmers, using clean tillage methods, could now expand their cleanliness addiction to the field level.

Farmers became obsessed with burying plant residues and achieving the visually appealing, clean soil surface in fields before planting.  State and national moldboard plowing contests became popular in the early and mid-20^th century, honoring farmers who were the best at burying all surface residue during the plowing operation, leaving the cleanest soil surface possible.  The national plowing contest continues today each year.

But the use of the moldboard plow, which left the soil surface clean and free of “trash” also caused tremendous soil loss from the fields.  There were no crop residues to help protect the soil from wind and rain erosion.  Farmers were reluctant to adopt any reduced tillage systems or the ultimate reduced tillage system, called no-till.   Adoption was slow because effective herbicides for the no-till system weren’t developed yet and “trash” on the soil surface interfered with mechanical weed control.  The term, trash, was so ingrained in farmers’ vocabularies, that it took years and government incentives for farmers to abandon clean tillage systems, like those using the moldboard plow, and adopt no-till or reduced tillage systems. Reduced tillage left the soil surface looking “trashy.”

The newer, more positive term referring to trash in farmer’s fields is “crop residue.”  Now, under no-tillage systems, the trashier the field (fields with more surface crop residues), the better for controlling weeds, conserving soil moisture, reducing fuel costs, and controlling soil erosion.  It took over 50 years during the mid-to-late 20^th century to change agriculture’s view that a good soil seedbed doesn’t have to be clean and absent of surface crop residue at planting time.  Now, no-till and reduced tillage systems are prevalent in crop production due, in large part, to better machinery designs and the use of chemicals to control weeds.

Although agriculture has changed its mindset and value system toward trashiness within a field at planting time,  we have not valued ecological diversity of plants at the landscape level.  Less than a century ago, most farm landscapes had timber, weeds, tall grasses, brush, and shrubs on bottom lands, hillsides, and along waterways.  Wetlands dotted the landscapes.  Diversified farms had both animals and crops, therefore, farms had pastures, hay fields, and fenced roadsides with lots of plant and wildlife diversity.

Agriculture technologies, bigger equipment, economic incentives, crop insurance programs, and  market monopolies coerced farmers to abandon the more labor-intensive, diversified crop and livestock farms.   Removing the animals from the farm allowed farmers to clear land and concentrate efforts on crop production, specifically corn and soybeans.  As a result, fence rows, timbered areas, brushy waterways, and wetlands disappeared.  The ecological diversity in farm landscapes was sacrificed due to the economic devotion to these two crops.

The agricultural industry is mechanizing, reshaping, and cleaning farm landscapes like never before.  Vast deserts of corn and soybean crops now cover rural landscapes – intrinsically beautiful to those who have a cleanliness addiction and an economic tunnel vision.  Cleaning the farm is now a community norm, an unwritten commandment for rural communities to clear timber, remove weedy fencerows, clear trees and brush out of waterways, mow grassy roadways, and create extensive lawns on rural farmsteads.  Cleanliness is becoming a religious devotion and neighbors are ready to condemn the sinners. 

“Look at that farm,” neighbors might whisper.  “Never cleans his feedlots, weeds and trees in fencerows, buildings are rundown – just not a good farmer.”

And everybody is feeding the addiction – local farmers judging other farmers, landlords judging tenants, visitors judging farmsteads.  And the rural, cleanliness addiction has spread, like an airborne plague, to other parts of our society. 

Deforestation, soil tiling, and transformation of farming landscapes from more diverse ecosystems to monocultures of corn and soybeans, with manicured grassy waterways and fence rows, have untold impacts on micro and macro wildlife diversity.  It’s a food chain disruption with far-reaching effects and harm on the non-economic species found in nature.  Lack of plant diversity and widespread use of non-discriminating chemicals used in crop protection affects thousands of different species that are integral parts of the food chain – from blossoms to bees, from flowers to birds, from insects to fish, from rabbits to coyotes.  Bees and many insects need flowers to survive, birds need insects to survive, larger predators need smaller animals to survive, trees need pollinators to survive, and the list goes on.  Unheralded wildlife species silently disappear under a vast carpet of lawns and two economically valuable farm crops, corn and soybeans.  The resulting loss of biodiversity in plant and animal species is often unquestioned under agriculture’s mantra – we feed, clothe, and fuel the world.  But history teaches us that much evil can be wrought to nature’s bounty under humanistic axioms.  But we can’t rest on the surface of maxims – we need to reach deeper.

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As our country moved from an agrarian-based society to an industrial- and urban-based society, people took their cleanliness addiction with them.  People with farm heritage became engineers, city planners, national, county and state employees, park managers, and urban homeowners.  They entered the workforce predisposed and already hooked on the cleanliness addiction.  Laws, rules, and economics were designed and implemented to favor cleanliness. 

Some cleanliness efforts in our society are warranted but become malignant if unchecked.  States established weed laws to force farmers to control noxious weeds on their farms.  Farmers, in turn, demanded that states control noxious weeds on the road rights-of-way.  State and national seed laws were established to prevent the sale and transport of crop seed containing the most aggressive weed species and to limit the level of contamination of less noxious weeds.  Park and urban managers were hired on their abilities to clean and manicure lawns and control growth of native vegetation. Cities established laws and regulations for homeowners to clean and maintain attractive urban lawns.  Efforts to simplify and achieve merited cleanliness goals easily extends into harmful losses of natural diversity.

Counties turned to industrial applications of herbicides to clean roadsides and to improve vehicle safety.  Herbicide use allowed counties to utilize mechanization and technology to replace manual labor costs.  Unfortunately, many roadside herbicides kill broadleaf, flowering forbs and have turned roadsides into monocultures of surviving grass.  And what is the resulting temptation of turning mixed plant roadside habitats into a monoculture of grass?  Mow the grasses with big, comfortable lawnmowers or industrial-sized tractor mowers.

So, it’s not just farmland that shows the cleanliness addiction – it’s the millions of acres of manicured lanes, highways, streets, urban lawns, parks, and country estates.  Hundreds of thousands of miles of roadways and hundreds of thousands of acres of nature’s mixed stands of diverse plants have been converted to grass that we now mow.  Appearance is everything.  We have embraced and defended cleanliness in all aspects of our society using religious analogies, economic policies, laws, norms, and shaming.  Cleanliness is inherently good and justified for many valid reasons.  But we lose our way when we focus solely on cleanliness while living within our natural surroundings.  “To be clean is to be healthy” and “To be godly, we need to be clean” are humancentric beliefs.  Simple acceptance of these phrases can be used as a doctrine for living and a pathway to heaven for some people, but they can be a road to hell for all other nonhuman species tied to the land.  

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More species are becoming vulnerable to extinction because of habitat loss, progressive agricultural intensification, and private and public penchants for manicured vegetation.  The rusty patched bumblebee, red-shouldered hawk, common barn owl, wood turtle, prairie bush clover, Mead’s milkweed, and northern long-eared bat are a few of the nearly 80 animal and 130 plant species on Iowa’s Threatened and Endangered Species list.  But likely, most people do not know or are not intimately familiar with these species.  If you can’t see them, can you value them or miss them if they go extinct?  

How many of us wake up and miss the passenger pigeon, one of the most abundant birds in North America in the 19^th century and one of the most tragic extinctions in modern history?  It took us about 300 years of human activity and uncaring attitudes toward nature’s diversity to wipe out the last bird of this species on the planet.  

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It’s difficult to provide diverse habitats in our landscapes if we can’t value them.  But, we can value species by studying and learning about them and knowing the habitats needed for their survival.  It can even be a spiritual effort to do so.  If one believes that the human species was ordained to be a shepherd of natural resources, landscapes with diverse plants are nearer to godliness.  The best farmers and urbanites are those with alternative landscapes of diverse plants, or “messy areas” that serve as sanctuaries for the multitude of the other species that depend on something other than plants of “commodity value.” 

Mother Nature on earth is not manicured.  It’s messy looking and the farthest thing from monoculture landscapes.  However, for many humans, a clean mind, clean body, clean living, and clean landscapes are the ticket to an afterlife in heaven.  But it begs the question:  Is heaven clean and tidy for only one species or diverse for many species?  I remember, as a child, asking my parents what they thought heaven was like.  I got two versions from Mom and Dad.

“Heaven is an open palace,” Mom said, “with no walls or windows. Angels sit next to God and there is plush seating everywhere.  The kitchen is huge and spotlessly clean.  The banquet table is endless.  The temperature is perfect, and people wear clean white robes that never get soiled.”

I asked Dad what he thought heaven looked like.  He cocked his head to the side, scratched his scalp with grease-stained fingers.  His mouth scrunched a little, followed by a quick, upward glance at Mom.

“Heaven is a place with good fences and crop fields and pastures with no cockleburs, velvetleaf, foxtails, or thistles.  It’s a place with big shade trees, good cigars, and cold beer, and the dealer always deals you a winning poker hand.”

Listening to my parents, I concluded that heaven was a clean place no matter what your perspectives were.  If you made it to heaven, you, everyone, and everything else were going to be clean.  There would be no bees or wasps to sting you, no smelly skunks, no rows of weedy crops, no trees that dropped branches among the vast manicured lawns and parks.  Heaven was a place that was eternally manicured.

What a shock it would be to find out that heaven might be a diverse place, with an entrance sign fastened by golden spikes to the pearly gates that read: WELCOME TO HEAVEN – A SANCTUARY FOR ALL OF GOD’S CREATIONS. ALL SPECIES ARE VALUED HERE.  ENJOY THE NATURAL DIVERSITY OF OUR LANDSCAPES. And under the sign is an admonishment: Who in the heck on earth started the rumor that “cleanliness is next to godliness?”

No species should have to die to experience a heavenly sanctuary. Wouldn’t it be fun to create a little heaven on earth for other species by establishing a bio-sanctuary of diverse plants in our own space, in our neighborhood, in our earthly landscapes?  The words of writer and environmentalist, Edward Abbey, are now more important than ever for our current and future landscapes, “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”  But in our own lives, words are not enough… we need “doers” too.  One can start by establishing or preserving a little bio-sanctuary of diverse plants on your balcony, garden, lawn, or farmland.  Instead of mowing grass, sit, listen, observe, and enjoy nature’s beauty in a place that you or someone else created. Quiet encounters with nature can be enriching and restorative… and spiritual.

Copyright © 2024 by Russ Mullen

Photographs courtesy of Russ Mullen,  Jill Mortensen and Matt Seymour.