The only time I had mowed a lawn before that summer was in the tiny yard of our last house in Los Angeles, during the summer of 1979, when I mowed our handkerchief-sized lawn a few times with the electric mower. From then until the summer of 1993, I had avoided mowing with the excuse that my duties with the children prevented me from tackling lawns.
That summer, the grass kept growing, and I made it my personal mission to keep it under control. David was only 10, too young to carry the burden of nearly ½ acre of lawn, the girls were squeamish about mowing, and I couldn’t afford to pay someone for yard work.
The yard had a lot more barriers in it then, and it took a good three hours to mow the entire property, so I generally undertook the chore in chunks: front yard, back yard, behind the barn, orchard. I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed the mowing. Hiking snob that I was, mowing had seemed too mundane to capture my interest, but I found the chore’s rhythms soothing. There was a certain challenge to navigating all the crannies and bumps of my yard, and the exercise felt good. I took ownership of mowing my property that summer, a sense of title, which I have never entirely relinquished since.
Oh, that mower. It has long since been retired, replaced with a self-propelled little hottie that whips around the yard, dragging me along behind. The mower of ’93, though, was a beast with a tendency to clog when the grass was long and damp. One had to push it, of course, but on the days when the dew still clung to the grass stems, a certain humping motion was required. Push the mower forward a foot or two, pause and lift the front two wheels by about six inches, like a bronco strutting his stuff, to encourage the sticky wet grass to whirl out to the side rather than clump around the blade, let the front wheels down again and push forward another foot or two. Sometimes it took a while to get even one section whacked back into submission.
Zooming the mower towards clustered thickets of dandelions gave a particular rush of mingled pleasure and vengeance. Off with their heads! Their persistently cheerful presence in the lawn inspired both aggravation and admiration; dandelions dominated several of the poems I wrote that summer.
Prior to taking over the mowing of my own yard, I had not known the meditative qualities of mowing. During every other chore I performed, indoors or out, I was available to the children. Mowing enveloped me in a bubble of noise and flying, stinging grass: I was unapproachable. A child could snag my attention by standing outside the range of grass flying from the mower’s blades, dancing and waving until I turned the mower off; in the sudden silence I would realize that they had been yelling, too, futile above the mower’s roar, but that was rare; they generally took phone messages for me and settled their own squabbles until I had come back inside, sweaty and tired and ready to be a mom again. The children were intimidated by the mower’s risk and roar, but I, alone inside that throaty, whirling grassy vortex, could think and wonder for a while; the stresses and tensions inside the house would have to wait, and they did.
The summer of 1993, I didn’t miss Joe, but I did miss the intimacy of a man in my life. Mowing took on a certain sensuality; it had always been a man’s labor before, but now I owned the task, began to actually anticipate the surrender to the sweat and sound and scent and hard push of the muscles working to control, wresting the machine’s power, the vibrations carrying the pulse of the engine deep within me. On hot summer afternoons when the orchard beckoned—after all, it was at the back of the property, and ringed by unruly blackberry vines along the chain-link fence—I yanked the mower to life half naked, clothed in only a bathing suit.
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