When I Mow...
By: Daniel E. Kramer
When I mow the lawn, passionate, tender, loving, brutal, exhaustive moments arise to meet me. They are not formal normal feelings, not something I am able to fully explain in words. Each day of mowing is a new light, and depending on the temperature, dryness, wind speed, pollen count, and pest volume (mosquitoes and spiders included) a determination of my attitude, mood, and fashion manifests.
Things then begin to become strange. I start to grow a tad bit resentful, aggressive, angry, and sometimes even slightly childish (imagine that). I guess you could say that my egotistical tendencies become apparent. The better version of myself begins to die or at the least diminish. Daniel goes on a hiatus, he takes a moment’s notice vacation to La La Land, and then he is left alone like a lamb within the lion’s cage, a mere snack for Meowson’s larger cousins.
Am I a playmate, or just a meal to be had by my other half?
What exactly am I talking about you ask?
What the hell am I saying?
Let me explain...
First, my grumbling old mower starts to pulse and sliffle, slurch and burp, crack and criffle. Not enough horsepower, mixed with strange varieties of country rye, blade grass, broad leaf, random rodents and bugs, a dull rusted blade, left over children's toys mixed among the Bermuda grass, tennis balls unseen, hints of cattail fluff; all adding together to create a toxic mental cocktail of despise and hatred.
My cut lines must be perfect of course, but not the kind of perfect a person would choose, no not like that at all. The lines I mow need to include sinistral faulting, dextral slip of the swath, impunity for the occasional overgrown tree branch, and so forth. Not the kind of normal that makes sense to most. It is the kind that only makes sense to this happy rock hound.
I have taken to hurrying, making it a race, making it a noon-day heat stroke activity. This is my way of seeing if I still have what it takes. This is my way of punishing myself for the blunders of having a large lawn that have led to this situation. It is the lesson of more is not always more. But less is generally harder to understand. Isn’t more the best way to go? Oh yeah, I forgot the rule about one being too many, and a hundred never being enough.
Forgot about that...not really though.
Will I win today, or will the lawn be victorious? God forbid I have to refill the gas tank.
Heaven only knows the reason for all of these feelings, but I seem to like the breaking of my spirit over this task. Like a challenge, like a game, I must break it before it breaks me. Like Dick Heaton says, "the easy way is the hard way, the hard way is the easy way." Don’t skip corners, don’t cut corners, and “don’t take no short cuts” (wise words taken from the lips of the remaining Donner party members). Could the Buddhist be right about all of this after all?
The smell of the fumes, the shredded material, the hack that I had to perform to keep the hatch from plugging every second or two leads to rocks and wood chips flying out at an alarming rate. Safety glasses have become a line of defense. Two broken windows are proof of that danger now.
I know, I sound like an idiot. Sure, from your side of the screen I am foolish and hasty. Why do this, why fight using such an Archean method? Dinosaurs had this down way better than I. Then again…
I listen to Hamilton now. It keeps me alert. “I am not throwing away my shot”…
Isn’t this the reason for my life? I feel as though I may be here now, I am here today to tell you, to tell you I am alive for one reason; I was born to mow that damn lawn. Dusk to dust, ashes to clippings, we all fall-down, or under. There are few doubts that the purpose for life is anything different than this symbolic task.
Every weekend, I meet to face the giant. Like David, I go forth to fight an impossible foe, a demon of the underworld incarnate, ready and willing, placid, calm, yet impossible to stop. The growth brings on beauty, but it has the capability to destroy my spirit if I let it, and so I fight to stay with it. I have a weekly reprieve and then it begins anew, the cutting and shredding of that gorgeous beast.
I admit, my wife’s love is directly proportional to my mowing capabilities. Her spirit is somehow linked, her kindness and love synced with the product I produce. A good job that is well done is the reward in and of itself, if you know what I mean. This is the reality of my life. “You get love for it, you get hate for it, you get nothing if you wait for it, wait for it….” such wise words Lin Manuel Miranda.
In this moment I am not mowing, but if I could be anywhere right now, I would be behind that sweet little 4.5 horsepower hopper, choppily chopping it all down.
So you see, it is not all bad. In fact, it is a place that gives forth life, that allows no one (man or beast) to stop growth. In the lawn there is endless ever enduring growth, where cutting begets more growth, more life springing forth from the dead edge vines. The cut and shredded edges, the wisps of foliage left ravaged somehow return with renewed vigor and strength as if to say, “ha, you ain’t got nothing boy…try again son…is that all you got?”.
In my mind, I have create businesses while mowing, started entire chapters in my mind of how I might do this or that differently in the next life. I plan out PhD’s, new degrees. Fantasies of grandeur and greatness emerge to show me who it is that my other side thinks I am, or could be. For better or worse, I get to have a weekly conversational, a devotional between the good and bad, the gods and the devils, the inner me and outer world. It is all the same, they are all the same. Things on the outside affect the things on the inside, and it is how we react and respond that define the next moments.
Like an artist who burns his art after it is finished, or a monk who blows away the sand designs, I look at the finalized and finished product knowing that within 48 hours certain grasses will have taken over again. They will have already grown to an unusually long length, making the surface look incomplete and ready for another mow. Such is life. I will be left with the feeling of wanting, and waiting, for I simply cannot fathom to do it again, yet I cannot imagine not doing it. Without it I would be a master without servant, a servant without master. Perhaps I am a bad master. Perhaps I need to be more of a servant. Should I buy more sheep, more goats, cows to tend the earth? Can I possibly train my dogs and cats to somehow work this out, cut down and maintain this paradise?
Blessed is the man who mows a homes lawn. This is perfect. All natural, one hundred percent pure wild, mixed into tender loving, tended by nature, and impossibly controlled by this man. What to do about nothing? There is certainly much ado about nothing on this fine day!
