The Marine Who Mowed Elm Street

Her grass was thicker and I had to raise the deck one notch. It took me most of an hour.

Halfway through, she came down off the porch with her cane and walked along beside the fresh stripes, slow, like she was inspecting troops. Then she nodded and went back up.

When I finished, I looked down Elm Street. There are nine houses on Grandma’s block, small frame houses all of them, built around the same year, with front yards and big old trees. And most of the grass on that block was too long.

Mrs. Darlene Kopp was next, across the street. She is eighty-one, a widow like Grandma and Mrs.

Fisher, and she was already standing in her doorway in her slippers when I pushed the mower across the street.

“Opal called me,” she said. “She said you’d be along.” She had a twenty-dollar bill folded in her hand.

I told her the same thing I told Mrs. Fisher, and she put the twenty in her housecoat pocket and said she’d find another way to get me.

After Mrs. Kopp came the Hendersons’ place, where Mr. Henderson is on oxygen now and his wife can’t push a mower.

Then the Lutheran pastor’s widow, Mrs. Weber. Then a rental with nobody in it. I cut that one too.

Mrs. Henderson came out while I was doing their front strip. She told me her husband had been watching me from his recliner by the window, and he wanted me to know I was overlapping my passes right.

I went up to the window and gave him a wave. He lifted two fingers off the arm of his chair, the way farmers wave from a pickup on a gravel road. That was a big wave from Mr. Henderson.

Mrs. Weber gave me a jar of her bread and butter pickles and would not hear a word against it.

I set it on the porch rail at Grandma’s to take in later, and kept going.

Somewhere around the fifth yard, I stopped thinking about my uncle. I just thought about the next pass, the smell of cut grass, the sweat running into my eyes, the sound of that mower. It was the best I had felt in seven months.

People started coming out. Mr. Ortman from the corner, who must be close to ninety, stood at the end of his drive in a Royals cap and gave me a thumbs up. A man I didn’t know drove by slow and honked twice.

I filled the mower tank three times out of the gas can. I stopped once to drink a glass of water Mrs.

Fisher handed me over the fence, and once to eat a cold biscuit Grandma brought down the sidewalk on a paper napkin.