This column first appeared in July 2011.
The breeze on my face did nothing to cool me as I gallumped across the wild grasses. I brought my steed to a halt, swiveled in the saddle to check my back trail. The hill behind me fell gently into a valley where panting trees sketched a pattern against the hot sky. I swung around, and after a few moments, climbed down. Long strides took me across the field and onto the deck, where I opened the back door to the kitchen and hollered to Bill, “How do you start the mower again?”
My friends Bill and Nancy live in Greenwood, and were preparing for a trip with their daughter Sydney to a gathering of the extended family in St. George, Florida. I was imported to be the trusted house and animal sitter for Max, a fluffy white Maltese dog and Buddy, a rough black cat.
“Would you do me a favor?” Nancy asked me, shortly after I had arrived. “Would you mow the lawn?” My friends live in a two-story, four-bedroom house on about two acres of land. “Lawn” would not have been my way of describing the expanse of grass at the rear of the house; my kind of lawn has been carved into more manageable bites. A forest hulks at the edge of this prairie and has been known to deposit deer onto the clipped and claimed back forty. Bill gassed up the John Deere LT 155 and “did the edges,” giving me a guide to the margins of the property before I took over.
The 95-degree temperature seemed to have sapped the clouds of life; they panted listlessly against the sky, too sullen to laugh at me below, as I went through spasms of spastic slapping at the black flies and no-see-ums that feasted on my legs and neck. The sweat that poured from my head gave them rivers and streams in which to bathe and bite.
At one point, my steed reached the tipping point on a chunk of land, and I half-rose from the seat in preparation for a bailout maneuver. When all four wheels were back on the same clump of ground, I roared at the land, a victory cry from the caves.
My eldest daughter once told me that the division of labor in her household never puts her in the mix for the lawn mower.
“My dad told me I’d cut my foot off, so I’ve never mowed a lawn and never will.” I sighed a proud sigh, unable to express my great joy at having left such an indelible impression on my child. Of course, a little of that attitude did bleed onto my son, but he is making efforts to scrub it off: he likes to sweat over the mower. As for me, I like my sweat on a cold bottle of beer.
Back at the house, Nancy edged the John Deere into a corner of the garage.
“Mowing’s hard work, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Not to me,” I said. “All I did was mash the gas and try to keep the thing upright. I guess if I had to do it all the time, it might become work.”
Our friend Lisa flew in from Florida that week, and as the “three amigos” relived the adventures of our twenty-seven year friendship, I pointed out with pride that I had mowed the lawn.
“Thanks for being a dear,” Nancy said, and hugged me.
Later that week, as I watched my friends’ Griswold-loaded minivan groan down the driveway, I thought, “I guess nothing does run like a dear.”
cjon3acd@att.net