Leah and I have words we use with one another to communicate about goings-on in particular areas of our property, but our words would be meaningless or even confusing to anyone but us.
There is a spot of ground, a small, grassy, pastoral place, open to the sky but bordered by big trees, and we call that the Picnic Grove, though we’ve never eaten a meal there.
We also talk about our Upper and Lower Pastures (Upper being closest to our house,) areas surrounded by electric fence where the barn critters graze. I would suspect most folks think of “pastures” as vast, open, maybe even flat land. Together, our pastures are perhaps only the size of one football field, and both are on a very steep hillside where there are tall trees but very little pasture grass because the trees there make too much shade.
Even the words “our property” might suggest ownership of a sizable piece of land, though our place is a relatively small 2.5 acres, and in some ways we don’t consider ourselves “owners,” but rather caretakers. We choose to keep most of this ground natural, and the descriptions we use for those wild areas are phrases like “the woods west of the house,” or whatever. This is habitat for the plants and animals that were here before us, and we hope will still be here after we’re gone.
A couple of nights ago I was walking near the bottom of the hill in the Lower Pasture and looked up at the black sheep Smokey, who was standing in the trees, waiting patiently for his evening hay. Some folks would suggest we cut those trees, grow more grass on that ground, buy less hay.
We'll choose to leave it as is.
