Keeper of the Greens

About Keeper of the Greens

At the bottom of the state the Ohio comes to meet the Mississippi, and Cairo lives behind its levees with cypress and magnolia growing where the rest of Illinois grows oak. The season runs long down here — grass green in March and still going in November — and Keeper of the Greens mows through all of it, trimming, edging, and clearing what the humid months pile up. River air makes everything grow twice over; a lawn left for a week turns into a project. Cutting it even, with a crisp margin along the sidewalk, is a small steady act set against all that southern abundance.