The Summer My Son Mowed Free
School started that Monday. Tucker went off with grass still on his shoes because he had gone out that morning, before the bus, to cut Mrs. Aldy’s lawn one last time, since summer was technically over and he had said the last one was Saturday but he wanted to make sure she went into fall with it short.
The street did not let it go. That is the last thing, and the best thing. About two weeks into September there was a knock on my door on a Sunday afternoon, and I opened it, and it was not two police officers this time. It was about forty people. The whole street, near about, Mrs. Aldy out front in a church dress, Gene Pruitt with his cart, the Dahlbergs, Carol Whitfield, Sergeant Mercer in plain clothes with his grandmother on his arm. And they had a mower. A new one, a real one, self propelled, the good kind Warren would have approved of, with a red bow on the handle, and they had a card signed by every single person on three streets, and inside the card was not money, because they knew better than to try to hand Tucker money, but a note that said the whole neighborhood had agreed to keep his father’s lawn, our lawn, cut for as long as we lived in that house, so that the boy who took care of everyone would have somebody taking care of him.
Tucker did not know what to say. He is not a kid who cries easy, he gets that from Warren too, but he cried on that porch in front of forty people, and Mrs. Aldy took his face in her two old hands and she said, loud enough for the whole street to hear, “You listen to me. Your daddy would be so proud he couldn’t stand it. And so would God. Now go start that mower before I have a heart attack from waiting.”
He started the mower. Forty people cheered on my lawn like we had won something, and I suppose we had. And I stood in my doorway, the same doorway where I had once watched two squad cars pull up and felt my whole world tip, and I watched my twelve year old son push a brand new mower across the grass while an entire town clapped for him, and I understood, finally and all the way through, what Warren had been trying to tell me all those years.
You do the right thing because it is the right thing. And every so often, if you are very lucky, the whole street shows up to prove you were never doing it alone.