We are all that child, knees pulled to our chests against the darkness, hiding secrets. I’m not talking about subterfuge or concealing indiscretions or even the emotions we brush from our sleeves. I’m talking about the parts of ourselves we know but don’t know we know. I’m talking about latency, about personal tectonics. I think telling stories is one way to bring those plates towards collision. Philosophers and artists, those subjects of erudite deconstruction in the finest schools, they’re just working it all out too but in refined methods of logic and form.  So too the grizzled raconteurs chewing their cigars to pulpy nubs in the back rooms of pubs, the coffee shop bloggers, bar napkin songwriters, three-times-a-day-dogwalkers, children elaborating plots, even that guy in front of the Sencha Tea Bar in Madison who just free flows for hours, all that rhyming angst oozing from his pores, covering him in a veneer of sweat, a polyurethaned poet – we’re all coaxing to the surface the tiny sliver beneath the skin, the sharp point of which jabs, jabs until, finally, we tweezer the damn thing out.

My neighbor, Buck, has been struggling to mow his half-acre. Another spot of cancer, this time in the prostate, (his words) ruined his Christmas with surgery and radiation. Made the grandkids sullen and too careful with their noise and their games. And now with the Flutamide and Xtandi, forget about it, there’s just no lead in the pencil (also his words). He thinks Vietnam has something to do with it but the VA folks say no, the markers just aren’t there, the PSA levels tell the truth.

Buck manages to push two or three loops around the yard behind his 1974 Sears/Craftsman, the Eager-1 model, then slumps a bit in the mown path, resting, waiting, still optimistic. I try to imagine what he thinks about during those staid moments of repose. Is he urging his heart to a more vigorous pumping, willing an impossible flood of testosterone? Lost in a memory that would seem, logically, to have no bearing on mowing the lawn? Eventually, Buck shuts down the Craftsman and shuffles inside, the mower abandoned where it stands, mid-loop, the trail ahead thickening by the hour. Sometimes I can’t get the image out of my head, that stranded old mower. There is nothing I can imagine quite so forlorn. Its damning is more than I want to think about.  Buck needs the day, sometimes two, to recoup a bit of stamina to attack another two or three loops. The circle doesn’t seem to get much smaller at such intervals. The consequence of such an erratic mowing strategy, of course, is a lawn of varied lengths, tiny graduated shelves of green that take a week’s worth of stops and starts to even notice. In the event Buck spirals toward a final loop, that is to say, when just a single line of uncut grass remains, he’ll need to wheel the Eager-1 back to the outer ring and start again.

I hadn’t seen that grass at uniform length in seven weeks and finally, the circular madness of it all reached a kind of critical mass in my head. So last Sunday, around four o’clock in the afternoon, I noticed Buck was in the midst of one of his breathers, the ritual prelude to quitting. I walked head-on towards the Craftsman, waving both hands in front of me as if it might startle and explode across the yard unawares. Buck’s skin glowed with sickly translucence, the thin blue veins branching across his shin bones like pathetic trickles in a dried-out creek bed. Not a single shoot of hair endured on his arms or legs, just a smooth preternatural baldness like rice paper or vellum. Buck bent to a lever which cut the mower’s power. How these old machines work I have no idea, but the energy it required to kill the engine exceeded Buck’s last reserves so that he had to use the handles to hoist himself upright. The front end of the Craftsman kicked up a bit, not much. Buck weighs 110 pounds, give or take. I felt something like sorrow knowing that he’d blown his last bits to hear what I had to say.

“Hey, Buck”, I said. “How’s about you let me take care of the grass for you? I’ve noticed your circles, that is to say, the outer ring there is pretty thick.” I stammered another fool line or two, keeping everything impersonal, the man is not his lawn sort of thing.  “Anyway, I’ll just finish it up, make it all one length. That be okay?” Buck studied his half-acre, contemplating.

“Yeah, I think that’d be okay,” he said. “But maybe just this patch here. You see, it gives me some trouble up near the road.” He pointed with his chin. “You’ll see that section over near the road is full of holes and it’s tough going.” I looked to the spot but couldn’t actually make out any changes in the topography. About the holes, though, I didn’t doubt the trouble they caused as my own yard suffers that same condition.  Nonetheless, it all looked pretty smooth, except, of course, the tiered grass length variants which gnawed at me still.

“Have you considered another pattern, maybe an East/West, West/East alternating columns kind of thing?”

I’ve never really liked the perimeter cut. Striping keeps me right where I’m supposed to be is how I see it.” That’s all true. It’s not that I hate the Perimeter-Cut technique; it’s entirely gratifying, actually, to corkscrew inwards toward the yard’s precise center point. And to mow that last thin line of grass is a downright pleasure. But still. For a host of reasons (sun in your eyes, compacted soil zones, patchy slopes) circling a yard harbors a dreadful potentiality – a lost line of demarcation. It’s not that you’ve forgotten the path or direction, you know it exists, but it just can’t be distinguished. Worse still, should you simply forge ahead oblivious, is that you can expect the same trouble on the next loop. Losing the mown track, stopping the work mid-mow is to float untethered in space. All you can do is accept that your line will reappear when the earth turns just enough to reflect a new trajectory of the sun’s rays. Of course, you can always plunge headlong, hope to catch a hint of your lost line somewhere meters and, meters hence, but I don’t recommend it. No, I like the clarity of interchanging stripes, to be certain of where I’ve been and where I’m going. And another thing: the aesthetics of the Perimeter-Cut are all wrong. I love that grass’s greenness is changeable depending upon the direction from which it’s mown and from the angle at which it’s viewed. With striping, grass reveals a kelly/forest/kelly/forest/kelly/forest expression that presents both contrast and harmony in simultaneous articulation. Like nostalgia. Like love.

For 40 minutes we went round like this, Buck and I, a couple of lawn poets contemplating the subtleties of Donne’s conceits, fusing the sensory and the abstract. Buck said he’d never tried striping, for no particular reason really, he wasn’t opposed to the idea on principle and that it was okay with him if I wanted to change things up. He said he always felt that the smarter approach was to take a closer look at a yard in its entirety, its identifying contours, the cornering it might require, then let the character of the lawn determine for itself how it needed to be mowed. I told him that I thought that made a lot of sense, but that I liked to go my own way. He insisted, though, that I use the ’74 Eager-1 instead of my self-propelled Toro. The yard had never been cut by another machine, he claimed, and the Eager-1 cut splendidly, evenly. After the house, it was one of the first items he bought when he returned from Nam. He and his wife, Connie, had picked it out from the Sears catalog together. She liked that it was orange and for his part, he’d grown up with Sears products and believed in them. Great service department, he said, not that he ever needed it. In all those years, Buck had performed his own loving maintenance on the Eager-1. Not just blade sharpening and the occasional spark plug replacement, but deep dives into the guts of the thing, choke shafts, and valvetrains. Crankcases. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I felt like he was trying to teach me important lessons I’d been ignoring my whole life. He was absolutely right, though, that Eager-1 mowed masterpieces.

When I finished striping the yard, Buck pulled a couple of collapsible lawn chairs out of the garage, set them up on the driveway. He’d been scrutinizing my cut from the living room window. I could see he was studying the lawn, critiquing, silently, the kelly/forest ribbons. Nothing about his expression suggested displeasure and I felt pretty good about that. Some coloring had come back into his face and we sat in the lawn chairs, the Eager-1 resting three feet in front of us, cooling.

“How’d it go through that rough patch over near the road?”

“Well, it’s full of holes,” I admitted, “just like you said.” Buck nodded and seemed to like that I’d mentioned that part.

“I’ve always enjoyed mowing the lawn”, he said. “But I’m on these medications, you see, and they just take it out of me.”

It was then Buck told me about Christmas with cancer, his third diagnosis, his theories on what he’d been exposed to in Vietnam, and his trouble with the folks at the VA. He wanted to bring out all his pill bottles just to show me but didn’t. He talked about buying the house in 1974 and how each winter since, he’d dissected the Eager-1, cleaned the knob wing plates and baffles, replaced any worn washers, and reassembled it so that when the grass was ready for a first mowing in spring, the Eager-1 would be like new. He told me about the 1/3 rule for April cuts and to leave some areas unkempt to encourage habitats. He talked about his grandchildren and the games they liked to play when they came to visit. He talked more about Vietnam. He said it was likely some kind of cancer would get him eventually, but he was hoping for 10 more years. He was just sifting through it all then, telling me what he had been very close to knowing all along.

At six o’clock, I told Buck it was time for me to head home, have some dinner with my family. He said that was the most important thing, then suggested I stop over the following weekend, talk about filling those holes by the road, maybe do some trimming. He said he would show me how to properly sharpen my own mower’s blades, talk me through some basic maintenance. Together, we folded the chairs and put them back into the garage.

I circumnavigated the outer ring of my own yard before going into dinner, discovered some contours I’d never noticed, plotted a subsequent mowing, then walked a kelly path back home.

– Joseph Costa