The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

I had time to think about everything, and I mostly thought about Nell sitting at her kitchen window looking up at that hill.

The road out our way winds along a creek for a while and then climbs up past two Christmas tree farms and a dairy that went to beef cattle a few years back.

The cows lifted their heads and watched me go by like I was the strangest thing they had ever seen.

A dump truck from the quarry passed me going the same direction and gave me two short honks.

I lifted one hand off the lever. I don’t know who was driving, but it felt like somebody saying good morning.

Then, about a mile from Nell’s, a pickup came around the bend the other way and slowed down.

I knew the truck before I knew the face. I had ridden in it a thousand times. It had a dent in the tailgate from the year Brent backed into the hay barn, and he had never fixed it because he said it gave the truck character.

He slowed almost to a stop. His window was down. For one second we were maybe twenty feet apart, me on my mower on the shoulder and him behind the wheel, and he looked right at me.

I looked right at him. I did not wave and I did not frown. I just looked at him, the way you would look at anybody you passed on a country road on a Saturday morning.

He kept going. I heard his engine pick back up behind me, and I did not turn around to watch him go.

I don’t know where he was headed that early. Maybe to the farm store in town, maybe to see a man about something.

I didn’t let myself think about it long. I had three acres in front of me and the sun was coming up fast.

I pulled into Nell’s yard a little before seven. The dew was still heavy, which is not ideal for mowing, but I figured by the time I got going up the hill the bottom would be drying.

I didn’t go to the door. I didn’t want her coming out and fussing and making me coffee and telling me to go home.

I just lowered the deck, pushed the throttle up, and started at the bottom.

The first pass was hard going. The grass was so tall and thick that I had to raise the deck a notch and take it in two cuts, once high and then once low.

The mower bogged down twice and I had to back up and ease into it again.

But then it caught its rhythm, and I caught mine. There is something about mowing that empties your head. The engine is loud and steady, and the grass falls over in a clean line, and you watch the stripe behind you and feel like you have done one small right thing.

I ran the hill up and down, never across. That is the first rule of a zero-turn on a slope.

Pop taught Brent that when Brent was sixteen, and Brent taught it to me the first summer we were married, and I have never once forgotten it.

You run up and down so the mower can’t tip sideways on you. On the steep part near the top, below the big tree, I didn’t take the mower at all.

I knew better. I left that for the trimmer, if I could find one.