My parents spent much of their youth working their way off small family farms in the Deep South. Then, newly middle class in the early 1980s, they sent me back every summer the second school was out.
The annual transition from the suburbs to the southwest corner of Georgia felt like changing worlds. My cousins were similarly sent South, and our grandparents’ farm was where we were unplugged — video games and cable television left behind for fire ant mounds, cows behind electric fences and no traffic lights for miles. Our parents weren’t worried we spent too much time indoors; nor was the summer vacation simply cost-effective day care. Rather, each year, they replanted us in the region’s red clay to live in the place where they were raised.
It was an ’80s version of touching grass. That phrase signals an intervention for people who spend too much time in a virtual world, lost in social media scrolls and digital debates detached from real life. It is two parts dismissive rebuke and one part self-awareness — those chronically online are admonished by others, and sometimes chastise themselves, to “go touch grass.” The idea is that interacting with the natural world directly, rather than through a device, is grounding and offers a reprieve from feeds curated to our liking.
Whether today or four decades ago, though, the point isn’t merely getting outside — it’s the break from routine and a change of scenery. Daily rhythms and the usual interactions are replaced by new experiences, ones that force us away from the familiar and out of the bubbles we build for ourselves. Left unchecked, those bubbles can make the world feel small and uncomplicated. Summers on a rural farm might seem like the simple life: slow, straightforward and insular. But once away from the suburbs, it became a world wide open for exploration and autonomy.
The days were filled with feeding pigs and chasing chickens, fishing with sugarcane stalks and hot dog chunks, and eating blackberries off brambles and peaches plucked from trees. My grandmother filled us with homemade meals and enrolled us in the county library’s summer reading challenge; we surveyed the property from the back of my grandfather’s pickup truck, wisps of pipe tobacco smoke in the cabin. And we pushed the bounds of boyhood, shooting bottle rockets while riding bikes and testing the nerve of billy goats with their dander up. We were too busy to miss our screens and wired suburban lives.
Well, mostly. One summer, in a series of dares about which cousin could touch the electric fence without getting shocked, I lost. The second I touched the wire, a pulse of electricity caused my finger to lock around it. The more I struggled, the more entangled my grip became. For what felt like forever, the jolts arrived every second until my grandfather switched off the power, and my grandmother rescued me from the device I held in my hands. Once freed — and wiping away tears from fear rather than pain — I couldn’t help but laugh alongside my cousins, who were now in stitches.
While touching grass was initially a flip way to tell people to log off, psychologists and behavioral therapists have long noted the mental and physical benefits of communing with nature. There, no algorithms exist to steer you back into the digital muck, distorting perspectives on what’s occurring in the real world and stressing nervous systems already on edge from excessive screen time. A cottage industry has emerged to help people disconnect, ranging from phone-free wellness retreats to self-guided digital detoxes that reorient daily life away from virtual enclaves. Even something as simple as spending time with family and friends back home can offer relief, no apps necessary.
It’s a lesson my parents quickly learned. They were each in their families’ first generation to finish college and secure white-collar jobs — my mother’s starting salary at a large tech company was more than my grandparents had ever earned in a year. Chasing the American Dream often meant feeling like country kids in a corporate America, fish out of water. And for all the comforts success brought — cable TV and air conditioning — my parents sent me South every June, to show that the world was bigger than the one they’d carefully tailored for me.
The family still gathers most summers, and tales from the farm always come up. Before long, the room is in a laughing fit at the cousin who chased chickens until one turned the tables and chased him. Or the time when my finger got caught in the electric fence and lit up like a video game. For my parents’ generation, touching grass meant leaving the manicured lawns and shopping malls for the red clay of home; for me, it meant returning to grassroots, plugging into the place that mattered most.
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