Stiff Upper Lip

 

During the normal weather of the summer, that is sun, heat, and rain every couple of days, the grass of my lawn grows rapidly.  More than a week between cutting and it’s beginning to look like I do when I try to stretch a haircut to six weeks.  Shaggy.  Lately we’ve had a stretch of rain, lotsa rain.  A few days of lotsa rain.  The lawn reacted.  My grandfather would want to bring out the bailer and get the hay ready for bailing.  The forecast listed cloudy with no rain until the afternoon.  Time to fuel up the mower.

Trying to start a habit of being good to myself, I usually split the mowing into two sessions on two days.  Age, heat, push, pull, yada, yada, yada.  But considering the monsoon that had descended upon us, if I got a four hour window, get it done.  When I finished the first half, I chugged some lemonade, wrapped a wet tea towel around my neck and went back out into the 90 degree, 85 percent humidity. 

It was getting hard to see through all the sweat pouring down my face, and I had to push the chattering mower close to one of the big pine trees on that side of the yard.  The cone was one of the tight ones, it hadn’t opened yet.  Picked up by the rotary blade, the cone was flung at the tree that had dropped it, bounced back, and hit me in the mouth.  It felt like a sucker punch from an offended boyfriend, or someone who you just beat on a layup, for the seventh time.   Sometimes they take you by surprise, sometimes they’re embarrassing for the one throwing the punch.  This was the former kind.  I thought maybe I was hallucinating from overheating or dehydration.  But the blood in my mouth made me stop to make sure I hadn’t lost a tooth.  Immediately my upper lip swelled up as if to prove that I better watch running that noisy thing near the tree’s roots, his turf and all.  Or it could have been, I better watch running that noisy thing near her kids.  Either way, I had a fat lip.

I shook my head, restarted the mower, and finished the job.  The bleeding had stopped, but I still had a golf ball above my upper teeth to prove I had lost the fight.  As I was putting the offensive mower away, I wondered why nature doesn’t hit back more often.  Maybe it does, but people don’t give the trees or the raccoons or the squirrels credit for the assault.  We don’t give nature credit for having power. (Global warming isn’t real right?) Maybe I need to let the yard know I’m just giving it a haircut, no harm intended.  In the old days, our ancestors talked to the spirits of the trees and the sea and the animals.  Hey, it’s only polite.  After all they were here first.  Where do we get off messing around with their back yard?

Gotta remember that next time I gas up the mower.