The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

And I think he is still ashamed of how he walked out of the first one. Shame makes people do strange things.

It makes them avoid the places where the shame lives, and his mother’s house is one of those places.

None of that cuts grass. That is what I kept coming back to, standing in her yard with the seed heads tickling my legs.

All the reasons in the world, and the grass was still knee-high and the path was still gone.

“I’ll come Saturday,” I told her.

She finally looked up at me. “You will not. You’ve got your own place to see to.”

“My place is two acres and I did it Tuesday,” I said. “I’ll come Saturday, Nell.”

“How are you going to get a mower out here? You don’t have a trailer.”

That was a fair question. I had sold our old utility trailer in the divorce because I could not back it up to save my life, and I had not missed it since.

I thought about it a second.

“I’ll drive it,” I said.

She laughed out loud, the first time I had heard her laugh in a while. “Six miles on a mower? On the county road?”

“On the shoulder,” I said. “People do it all the time out here. I’ve seen Lonzo’s grandson do it.”

She shook her head, but she was still smiling when I left, and she lifted one hand off the dishpan to wave at me the way she used to lift it off the steering wheel.

After the divorce, I bought myself a used zero-turn from a man in Willis who was moving to Florida. It is red, with a fifty-two inch deck, and I paid twenty-four hundred dollars for it.

It was the first big thing I ever bought with my own money and nobody else’s opinion.

A zero-turn is not made for the road. It steers with two levers instead of a wheel, and it will do maybe seven or eight miles an hour flat out.

But it will get you there, and on a Saturday morning in Floyd County, nobody much is going to bother you about it.

Friday after my route I went out and changed the oil and sharpened both blades on the bench grinder in my garage.

My daddy taught me how to sharpen a blade when I was fourteen, and I still balance them on a nail before I bolt them back on.

I filled the tank and filled a two-gallon can and bungeed it to the footrest. I laid out an old pink T-shirt and my sunglasses on the chair by the door, the way I lay out my uniform on school days, and I went to bed early.

Saturday I was up at 5:30. I drank my coffee standing at the counter and watched the light come up gray and then gold over the ridge.

It was going to be a clear day, warm but not hot, the kind of June morning you get maybe ten times a year up here.

I pulled the mower out of the garage and checked the oil one more time. Then I drove it out my lane and turned left onto the county road and settled onto the shoulder with my right wheels in the gravel.

Six miles is a long way at seven miles an hour. It took me close to fifty minutes.