The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

Monday

We were back on the route by one o’clock in the afternoon.

I had moved the Monday yards around in my notebook so the smallest lots came first, and I had Jarrell load the trimmer, the blower and two rakes beside the push mowers.

A twenty-one-inch push mower cuts a strip a little under two feet wide.

A sixty-inch zero-turn cuts five feet at a time and moves at a good clip. On a quarter-acre lot, that is the difference between fifteen minutes and fifty.

Here is how we did it. Jarrell took the back of every yard with the black self-propelled, and I took the front with the red one.

When we each finished, one of us trimmed and the other blew off the walks and bagged the clippings at the curb.

Running both push mowers at once, we could do a quarter-acre lot in about half an hour, plus the trimming and the cleanup.

If nothing broke, that came out to around eight or nine yards a day, if we went from seven in the morning until supper.

That first afternoon we did five yards. It was eighty-six degrees and humid, the kind of June afternoon in Wayne County when the air sits on you like a wet wool blanket and the corn across the road looks like it is growing while you watch.

By the third yard my hands had started to blister on the inside of the thumbs, where the bail handle rubs.

By the fifth, Jarrell had stopped talking entirely, which for him is not much of a change, except that he had stopped looking at me too.

On the drive home I asked him if he was all right.

He looked out the window at the Amish farm on the corner, where a man was cutting hay with a team of four horses, and he said, “That guy doesn’t have a zero-turn either.”

I laughed so hard I had to pull over on the berm.

It was the first time I had laughed since seven o’clock that morning, and I think that was why he said it.