The Grass Collectors, by Crawdad Nelson

Ano Nuevo State Reserve in California, photography by Crawdad Nelson (USA) contemporary

The Grass Collectors

Sometime after tea kind of late the grass cutters arrived as a group of three and fanned out over the mountain with their knives. They only wanted the long white tassels that stood out of the scrub every few yards neatly distributed by their own velvet seeds, spread by wind and fire and the endless construction of roads through country never meant to have roads. They sell them somewhere to a florist or a realtor staging million-dollar homes meant to look lived-in but restrained. Just before dark they started returning to the car, each burdened under a bundle of the long cut stems, tails that swish when they step across the crisp eruptions and dried berms underfoot, where everything is disturbed. Even the grass is a foreign invader, climbing every raw cut in the name of vanity, something once done for money that won’t go away.

Crawdad Nelson

​Crawdad Nelson is a private citizen with few artistic pretensions. He hasn’t been to a poetry reading in years, and writes mainly for his own amusement. His work tends to be image-driven with landscapes a central obsession.