Mow No Mo

Late yesterday afternoon, I decided to do my final full mowing of the year, since the temperatures are slated to drop steadily throughout this week. This is typically the timeframe in which I drive the little yellow tractor out of the barn for the last time of the season. It was a most glorious day to ride the machine and cut the grass down. I did the front and back yards, along with the front meadow. My neighbor’s son always mows the south pasture because he rakes and bales the grass for hay.

I chewed up the leaves with the blades and they will make good compost material; I’m determined to try building compost again this year, after an extended hiatus. While I was driving back and forth over the living acres, the dust hung in the air, making the beams of sun look like beams of blonde wood, propping up the rest of the air around me, ready to be nailed and festooned with news and theses and perhaps a recipe or two. But then I drove into those beams and they shattered and swirled and broke apart into new shapes, only to settle back into beamishness once I’d passed.

I finished the job a bit before sunset, and tidied up a bit, making mental notes about a few other mowing-related things I need to do, like getting at some hard-to-reach spots and in between some treacherous tree roots with the push mower. Right now, looking out across the front garden, seeing the neat carpet sloping up and down, and the white adirondack chairs beneath the peach trees, and the ebony cows in the next pasture over, and the rapidly russeting leaves in the closest copse of trees, and I am tempted to think that it will be a long time before I fire up the tractor again. But I know that I will merely turn around and the ice will be receding and the trees will be budding and the sweet spring grass will be pushing up through the chilled earth…and I will begin watching and listening for hummingbirds. It will all come about much quicker than I anticipate, even though I know it’s coming. And that’s one of the lovely mysteries of this life: even the things I know are coming can still surprise me or catch me off-guard.

I’m pretty good at identifying birds by their call, thanks to my grandmother’s tutelage in my youth, but there’s been a mystery bird up in the woods for about a week now, and I wish I could learn what it is. The call is very distinctive. If you’ve ever heard a Southerner express dismay or disappointment with an “Ohh-oh,” that’s what it sounds like. Imagine Andy Griffith being told that Deputy Fife wrote a ticket for jaywalking to a widder-woman, and that’s what this bird sounds like. Most vexing not to know.

Speaking of birds, I found a meme online that I have been unable to attribute to anyone. I thought it was a poem, or an excerpt of a poem, but I’ve entered the entire text into a search engine and have been unable to find anything. I thought I would transcribe it here:

To the swallows: ‘see you next year.’
These swallows? No
matter. On the wires
will be swallows, the music
of time in customary
notation. Not like
me whose migrations
are endless, though my perch
be of bone. One April
I will return to it
No more. As nature
replaces it creatures
so life will replace
me, a migrant
between nominatives,
a new singer of an old
song, an innovator
too regardless of time
for the time-keeping swallows.

— author unknown

Isn’t that pleasant? And mournful. And true. I love that line “One April I will return to it no more…” This is of course the season where my thoughts go to the temporal nature of this life, and to the cyclical nature of all things, and this waters and suns the little sprig of hope that has managed to stay living in all the deadly hours, in all the bleak and silent hours spent with head inclined and eyes closed and questions buzzing around me like mayflies, those short-lived little spring things.

~ S.K. Orr