Rites of spring

CAN YOU HEAR IT? Can you smell it? When the lawnmowers rev up and the air fills with the unmistakeable scent of cut grass — sweet, crisp, almost quaffable — it’s a sure sign that the growing season is upon us.

“Who was the fool who made January first New Year’s Day?” asks Grandpa Spaulding in Ray Bradbury’s nostalgic classic, . The day when the grass is finally long enough for cutting, triggering a “great swelling symphony of lawn mowers… that