The most frequently-heard September Song here does not contain poignant descriptions of getting old. It contains the surging baritones of a diesel engine accompanied by the grinding, hissing, and occasional clanging percussion of a rotary mower. Late summer and early fall are when many meadows and other fields are mowed here.

Here you see Dennis Black this week, doing the annual mowing of our meadows, a two-day job that is tricky in some places. It’s morning in our sloping north field, early enough to be before the fog in Great Cove has finished burning off. He already has finished our relatively flat south field. Both meadows are filled with two- and three-foot high wildflowers, grasses, sedges, and other vegetation that are in their September browns and whites.

By the way, as I understand it, a “meadow” is a specific type of fallow field that is not used for agriculture (except maybe hay in some cases), but that is allowed to naturally vegetate with non-woody plants. An annual cutting is necessary to prevent quick-growing raspberry bushes, trees, and other larger plants from reappearing and changing the density of the land cover.

We postpone the mowing of our meadows until the fall to assure that their summer residents – multitudes of birds, insects, reptiles, and other animals – are no longer raising their families there. Deer also sleep in them and members of “our” brazen herd will continue to do so, even now that their camouflage is gone.

Here are a few before and after images:

For equipment buffs: Dennis is riding an AGCO Allis 5670 tractor reportedly powered by a 244 cubic inch, four-cylinder, air-cooled diesel engine from the 1000 series. He’s pulling what I think is a Woods single-spindle rotary cutter. That type of cutter (or “mower”) commonly is called a “bush hog,” which is not quite correct.

A “Bush Hog®” is a brand name that should be applied only to the field and brush-cutting machines of Bush Hog LLC, headquartered in Selma, Alabama. (That company advertises that, when it first demonstrated its invention in 1951, an amazed farmer said: “That thing eats bushes like a hog.”)

(Mowing images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 17 and 18, 2025.)

In the Right Place: September Song, Heavy Metal Version