Cutting Grass, Creating Order

I heard this poem today on Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac, and by poem’s end, I was gleeful.  Not infrequently, I read a passage from a book or a poem, and I recognize experiences I’ve had, which I was either vaguely conscious or had never fully brought into conversation with others.  So often, simple and seemingly odd pleasures are never articulated.

Cutting grass, especially as adolescent was a badge of competency and maturity.  No longer were my parents fearful of me losing a foot (although I once foolishly stuck my hand in the exhaust of our Toro and slit the ends of my fingers).  Cutting grass was effort with tangible results.  So little of our lives now result in a concrete demonstration of work.

Here is one of my own unspoken pleasures.  A few years ago, we bought a hyper energy-efficient dishwasher.  The most efficient mode is the three-hour wash.  While it appears contradictory that it would be so efficient, it sprays water slowly, and produces a steady hum, the white noise of dusk.  It signals days end.  It signals a tiny kind of order that allows me to be assured that I will wake the next day with clean dishes.

A bed which has been made is far more inviting than one with sheets balled up and littered with books and clothing.  A weeded garden.  Clothes folded and stowed among the others I do not need.

Another from childhood.  Saturdays were cleaning day in my childhood.  By days end, our refrigerator was filled with food for the following week and the smell of ammonia wafted from the kitchen’s linoleum floor.  Saturday was the first day of the week, and by those actions, we could do what we had to do.

Cutting grass, too, has its own kind of satisfaction.  There is the smell, of course.  But it is the order.  Cutting grass is like an exercise is in efficiency.  It is working out the quadratic equation and plotting a graph that, when I learned the language of mathematics, was consistent, predictable, and ultimately a form of certainty.  

The narrator of the poem alludes to the “ever-diminishing square,” which worked in most of he lawns I’ve cut.  Then there are the irregular shapes.  The five-acre triangle of my mother’s cabin.  Behind my current house, neighbors took turns cutting the flood plain and ridge that, miraculously, has not been developed given we are three miles from downtown Atlanta, its shape defined by the steep hills, the bamboo grove, and, again, the creeping kudzu.

More often than not, yards are wasted, especially those that are set so far back from the street, that to occupy them, you might be mistaken for a lonely, old grubber desperately needing conversation.  There, few children play.  The action is for the backyard: vegetable gardens, barbecues, Wiffle ball, and various forms of excess and illegality.

I no longer have grass to cut.  Oaks eighty-feet tall in my backyard, creates shad that only allows English Ivy and the pernicious Kudzu.  The front yard, most of which is shaded since we moved here in 1994, is covered in shad-loving plants enclosed in stone islands, and in between are mulched walkways.

P.S.  I received a number of responses from my last posting.  I encourage your to sing up for my blog and post your own unarticulated satisfaction.  

                             http://pencilgrub.blogspot.com/

Tamed  by George Bilgere

This summer my nephew
is old enough for his first job:
mowing the lawn.

I watch him lean his skinny chest
to the bar of the pushmower,
put his weight into it, and become,

for the first time, a beast in harness,
a laborer on the face of the earth,
somehow withering and expanding at the same time

into something worn and ancient, but still
a kid withal. And I remember
how bitterly I went into the traces,

hating that Saturday ritual
for a while, then growing inexplicably
into it, gradually mastering

the topography of the yard,
sometimes using the back and forth technique,
sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,

or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
that left, at the lawn's center, one
last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

I annihilated with a strange thrill,
then stood back to take a look--
to survey the field. To cast

a critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
at the edge of the mowed clearance.

Taking his own measure. And liking it.