The color and savory scent of a broomsedge field has always held a particular draw for me. It used to be nostalgia; now it’s something else. The grass is a sign of disturbed and fallowed ground in the Southeast, a kind of botanical requiem after progress’s colonial ravishings: the flora of grief.  It’s a grief in which I was raised unawares. The apartments where my family lived in North Carolina were built in the 1960s on a broad, decapitated hilltop. The edgeworks there, where much of the offgraded soil had been dumped, were wild with broomsedge, along with briers and blackberries.

The grass is a somewhat dependable marker of change.