The Lawn

We do not employ a gardener anymore, mostly for financial reasons, though the guy we did use—call him Al—is not around anyway. Al returned to his native Brazil for unspecified reasons. I think it’s fair to say that whatever those reasons were, they were not good ones for him. Anyway, we will miss Al, because he and his guys—he always had a few broken-English speakers with him—did the backbreaking work I refuse to do. I’d rather the yard go back to nature than cut down or pull out dead plants. Plus, he was a character. He played the bongos at Christmas and had a truck with a horn that made mooing sounds, like an especially loud—and large—cow. He was also cheap, but you get what you pay for. His men would clean up our garden in the spring but dump the vegetable matter on our property instead of either burning it (the professional way) or moving it across the street to our neighbors’ property (my way). When he’d mow our lawn, he’d miss spots and more than once skinned the roots of our weeping cherry tree, which may now be rotting as a result. He was always in too much of a hurry, as are a lot of illegal immigrants who are constantly hustling because they're feeding themselves, the Third World, and probably some of the First World too. And his attendance was erratic. He’d go for weeks in the summer without mowing the lawn, so it would grow over our shins, to the point where walking in it was more like wading, and small objects, including children, chickens, and cats, might get lost or at least stepped on. Of course, the fact that we were slow to pay him might have had something to do with his performance issues. Also, to be fair, he was more than just a weed whacker. He built a wall behind our house from stones he found on our property without using mortar. Occasionally one those stones will slide free, and I can't for the life of me put it back, because I don't know how the hell he did it. He was an artist.

Now that Al is no longer here, I have to do the mowing myself. I bought a machine that was fancy twenty years ago, like an old Mercedes, so its state-of-the-art technology is analog (mechanical) rather than digital (electronic). One of the things I like about it is that it was manufactured before government safety people made operating anything with moving parts a pain in the ass. I’m referring specifically to the fact that a contemporary mower won’t stay on unless you’ve got a hand on it, depressing a bar. They don’t want the thing to run unattended, because, I suppose, it might start rolling downhill and cut off your toes, if for some reason you were dumb enough to align it that way and to be standing in its path in bare feet. With this baby, I can stop, wipe my brow, hitch up my pants, drink a beer, all using two hands. (Many of these functions are best performed with two hands.) The downside of this mower is that it warms up like an old man, very slowly, coughing and spluttering, and sometimes, like an old man, it never really gets going. I try not to mind, because I know we’re a lot alike.