My stepdad is not feeling well, and I went over to mow the lawn today. I haven’t mowed this lawn in thirty-seven years. The front yard is above the septic system. Apparently, my grandfather, who was a plumber by trade, built the leaching field above an old riverbed and there are countless stones, large and small beneath the old lawn that never does well in the summer when the water table falls.
It isn’t like sitting in the dark, concentrating on breathing, and exhalations of “Om” but plodding around in ever smaller concentric trapezoids is it's own invitation to meditation. The mind doesn’t have much else to do besides roll back over some plantain stems, with the strange space port knobs, which you’d missed that last run and shave off a corner that takes me out of my way.
The mower could potentially cut the hose. So, move the hose. It isn’t your hose. If you cut it by mistake people will rightly be upset. When I was a sophomore in high school, just like my little girl is today, I was probably thinking about some girl at school who looked awfully nice but didn’t know I was alive. Or else it was that kid who was a senior who also seemed to be a punk. He was even British. But he wanted nothing to do with me and I imagined battling him as my teenage self pushed the mower along.
In the back yard my stepdad has let certain patches of the lawn go wild, so there is much less to do than in the days when I was the pusher-man. The walnut tree and the black locust are the same trees that used to be back here. Her old listeria tree that used to be covered in Japanese beetles is no longer in the yard. And that old cheery tree that there are photos of my dad holding me beneath is also long gone. But most of these trees are ones that stood fifty years ago when I first began to cognate this yard.
Monday 6/22/20
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