The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

I didn’t have to find one. Around nine, I came down to the bottom of a pass and turned, and there was Lonzo Akers walking across the road from his place with his string trimmer over his shoulder.

Lonzo is seventy-two. He has farmed the next place over his whole life, and he and Pop helped each other with hay every summer for forty years.

He is a short, wiry man who says about four sentences a day, and he says them like they cost money.

He didn’t say anything to me at all that morning. He just nodded once, pulled the cord on the trimmer, and walked straight up the hill to the old stones.

I watched him a minute before I went back to it. He worked around every headstone, slow and careful, the way you would comb a child’s hair.

Pop’s parents, and Pop’s baby sister who died in 1941, and Pop.

Then he did the steep part under the big tree that I had left. He did the edges along the fence. He did around the shed and the corn crib and the well house.

And then, when he was done, he walked back down the hill and nodded to me again and went home.

He never said a word. I found out later his wife had seen me go by on the mower and told him, and he had finished his coffee and gotten up and come over.

That was all. That is how Lonzo does things.

By noon, there were stripes all the way up that hill, light and dark, light and dark, the way Pop used to leave them.

The path was back. I had cut it fresh, curving around the steep spot, and you could see it from the road again.

I came back down the slope for the last time and stopped the mower at the bottom of the yard.

I pushed my sunglasses up on my head and wiped my face with the hem of my pink T-shirt.

And there was Nell on the porch of that little white farmhouse, her white hair bright in the sun, in the same blue housedress, waving at me with her whole arm.

Not one hand off a dishpan. Her whole arm, back and forth, like I was a ship coming into harbor.

I lifted my hand back. I didn’t get off the mower. I just sat there with the engine idling, the June sun on my shoulders, the whole hill green and clean behind me, and I let her wave.

Then she came down the porch steps, slow, one at a time, holding the rail.

She crossed the yard toward me, and I thought she was coming to say something, but she walked right past the mower.

She went to the bottom of the path, and she started up it.

I shut the engine off so I could hear her. She went slow. The path is a mower’s width and it is soft underfoot when it’s freshly cut, and she put each foot down careful, and every so often she stopped to catch her breath.

It took her nearly ten minutes to get to the top. I wanted to go help her, and I didn’t.

Some things a person needs to do by herself, and I knew without asking that this was one of them.