A friend asked me if I would do him a favor: Would I mow his 5-acre lot?
I told him he would be the one offering the favor. I had mowed years before, winnowing rows of goldenrod in vast fields along the river to keep them from overgrowing. I’d loved the three full days a week of hot, dusty work.
Nuances of the job returned to me quickly: engaging the power take off; setting the quadrant to lower the mower; hearing the motor’s small laboring, noting the slower clattering blades as I scythed through some taller and thicker grass along the margins of the lot; tickling the accelerator (in this case a 6-inch lever mounted on the steering column) for a subtle powering up ‘til all was smooth again.
On my first pass, a grasshopper landed on my arm. Birds whirled and swooped, gorging on the airborne bug banquet I’d served up.
I ran a losing race with the pine shadows’ steady, 7-o’clock progress into the field. Outpacing me, it reminded this 72-year-old man that this day, this idyll of sorts, was a revival of memory, not a rollback of time, which, as it’s said, waits for no man.
The foot-tall growth bisecting the field narrowed 8 feet with each pass, an unmistakable semaphore signaling the whole delightful thing was too quickly winding down.
The work done, I raised the mower, eased the throttle back, and parked the tractor in the soft-edged shadows in Don’s barn. I hadn’t asked a penny for my work, a job fairly done, but nonetheless took with me a billionaire’s richness of psychic wages.
