The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

The mower

Our riding mower is a green one with a forty-two inch deck that Duane bought used from a man in Tollesboro the year Riley was born.

My daddy taught me to mow when I was nine, out on his place in Fleming County, and he taught me the way his daddy taught him: straight stripes, overlap a hand’s width, never leave a ragged edge.

I checked the oil. I checked the gas and filled it from the can.

Then I went inside and put on a gray T-shirt and my jeans and tied a blue bandana over my head. My hair had thinned out over the summer, and I kept what was left pulled back in a ponytail under it.

I filled a big water bottle from the tap, not the refrigerator, because for days after an infusion anything cold felt like broken glass in my throat. I put my evening tablets in a little pill case in my pocket, three of them, and a pack of peanut butter crackers.

It was a hot, hazy August afternoon, the kind we get in the hills when the air hangs in the hollows and the far ridges go blue and soft. It was half past three, and the thermometer on the shed said eighty-nine.

I drove the mower out of our gravel and down the shoulder of the road, a quarter mile at a crawl, with the deck up.

A man in a feed truck slowed beside me and lifted two fingers off the wheel, and I lifted two back.

Norma’s grass was nearly to my ankles. Her little white farmhouse sat back on its rise with the front porch facing the road. The curtain in the front window was closed.

I did not knock. I did not call out. I drove to the ditch line at the bottom of her yard, lowered the deck, pushed the throttle up, and cut the first stripe.

Two acres

Two acres does not sound like much until you are thin and pale and five days past an infusion, sitting on a vibrating seat in August with the sun coming down through the haze like it has a grudge.

I mowed the first long stripe from the ditch to the side fence. I turned, overlapped a hand’s width, and came back. The smell of cut grass came up around me, sweet and green and hot.

On my third pass the curtain in the front window moved.

I did not look at it. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the line I was cutting.

But I saw it from the edge of my sight, the curtain pulled back and a shape behind the glass, and then the curtain did not close again.

She stood there. I mowed.

I mowed around her clothesline poles and the bird bath and the old cast iron kettle she grew petunias in.

I mowed close along the fence where the boy from church always left a ragged edge. I trimmed tight around the big white oak by the mailbox.

About forty minutes in, my stomach turned. I shut the blade off and sat with my forehead down on the steering wheel for a while, breathing slow through my nose the way the nurse taught me.

The palms of my hands burned. Those tablets do that; they make your palms and the bottoms of your feet sore and red, like a sunburn on the inside.

I drank some water. I counted to a hundred. Then I started the blade again and went back to work.

I want to be honest about this part. I was not a hero out there. Twice more I had to stop and put my head down.

My arms were coated in grass dust, and the sweat ran down under the bandana into my eyes and stung.

But the stripes behind me were straight, and they were getting wider, and every time I made a turn at the top of the yard I could see the curtain still pulled back.