Have Been Repeatedly Doused

I 'll finish the mowing of the yard just in time to start it all over again.  Today I went back up to the top of the road with this new electric mower.  Certainly, we’re getting good use out of this thing.  It already looks like its three years rather than three weeks old, covered in green dust and mud.  The battery isn’t easy to gauge.  If you go round and round and short, flat grass it lasts longer than if you chew into tall wet growth that forces the mower to conk out.  With a gas mower this would be a drag.  Pull the chord again and again to get it to start.  But this thing just requires you to push the button with the rod clutched and then release.  One suspects this ease of use is hiding wear and tear on the device and on the man.

 There’s a patch of the lawn along the drive that must be the neighbors.  I mowed it anyway.  We have to look at it just like they do, driving up out of here.  When I first started using thing device I was very careful about avoiding all roots and rocks but now I think I have an idea of just how close I can get and more or less what it will do if it hits something it doesn’t like.  It will simply stop.  Down along the slope to the lawn beneath the cedars on the north of our property the lawn was very thick and very wet and there the mower conked out a few times, and this seemed to eat up much of the charge.  Because what had been five lights flashing strong and changed to two lights left, suggesting that a full 2/5 of the juice is gone.  

Whether the battery is all used up after forty-five minutes or sixty, mowing on an empty stomach it is always the right time to stop.  Drenched in sweat, the air pregnant with humidity, the atmospheric amniotic sack ready to break, any moment, I wheel the mower back to the garage to pop the battery and let it charge.  I have on my black jeans which have been repeatedly doused with Permethrin forcing any ambitious ticks to reconsider the migration from my pant leg to my armpits or groin.  (I had to look up the spelling of that nasty chemical just now.  It is stored in my mnemonic chamber rather differently as something like: “Premithliquin”, which of course yields nothing when you search for it. I note that my father, who recommended the insecticide and who as a publisher all his life, pronounces it properly, as I can hear his voice once I see the word written properly.)

 

While the battery is charging I dig a few holes back beside the fenced in garden, behind the fenced in garden, and right in the middle of the fenced in garden.  I’ve had a few striped maples and one chestnut oak in pots few a month or more.  I’d like to drop them in spots which, if they succeed, should do for a new home.  The striped maple leaves are big and colorful in the fall.  The chestnut oak, as the name suggest would have completely, unique saw-tooth leaves unlike the giant northern red oak to its side.  My hope is to one day, have these both as part of the fall foliage here.  We’ll see.  Or perhaps I won’t, but you will. 

Thursday, 7/15/21