The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

Brent and I never had children. That was a sorrow for both of us, and I think it was a sorrow for Nell too, though she never said so.

She just treated me like her own daughter and let that be enough.

When Brent left, he left fast. He packed two duffel bags on a Sunday afternoon while I was at my sister’s, and he left a note on the kitchen table.

Twenty-two years, and it was a note on the kitchen table.

I won’t say more about it than that. It is old now. But I want you to understand why Brent and I have not said one word to each other in three years, not at the gas station, not at the feed store, not at his own daddy’s grave on Decoration Day.

And I want you to understand Nell. She raised two children on that farm, buried one of them, and buried her husband. Brent is all she has left.

She has never in her life asked anybody for anything. She would let the grass take the house before she called her own son and asked him for help.

So nobody was going to make a phone call. Brent was not going to call me, and I was not going to call Brent, and Nell was not going to call either one of us.

That is how it was.

“Who’s been doing the path?” I asked her.

“I walked it some in May,” she said. “Took the hand shears up there and did around Pop’s stone. But my knees aren’t what they were. I haven’t been up since the grass got tall. I don’t trust my feet in it.”

That was the part that got me. Not the yard. The path. Nell had kept that path open for fifty years, first for Pop’s mama and daddy and then for Pop, and now she could look out her kitchen window and see his stone and not get to it.

Pop Hylton was a big, quiet man who worked thirty-one years for the state road crew and ran forty head of cattle on the side.

He bought that riding mower in 2011, a plain green lawn tractor with a forty-two inch deck, and he kept it like a church kept its hymnals.

When he got sick, he made Nell learn it. He made her ride it with him sitting on the porch watching, and he corrected her until she could do the whole yard in straight lines.

After he passed, she mowed every Friday from April to October.

Eighty-eight years old and she did it every single Friday. I used to drive by and see her up there in her sun hat, going slow and steady up and down the hill, and I would honk, and she would lift one hand off the wheel.

So when Brent said she was too old, he was not exactly wrong. She was old. But it was hers. It was the last thing she did for Pop with her own two hands, and he took it out of her shed and put it on a trailer and drove it to Christiansburg.

I want to be fair to Brent, because Nell would want me to be. I think he is trying very hard to make his second marriage work.

His new wife likes things a certain way, and I think he is afraid of failing at it twice.