Meditation on mowing..

Meditation on mowing

As a child I lived opposite a bowling club. Every morning the gardener moved across the kitchen window cutting, rolling or watering the grass. Preparing the greens. The smoke from his cigarette floated above him like small grey signals coming out of his hat. I envied him. Nothing in the day except that green path and in the distance the Strezlecki ranges, a blue smudge on the horizon.

I loved being in the garden and in my last year at school, the back yard behind the shed became the quietest place on earth. Fruit trees, a vegetable patch, the chooks’ pen and me. In the afternoons when I finished milking the cow I stood there for a while by myself and wondered about things.

Now, half a lifetime later, I mow for meditation. Up and down, over and across I circuit the yard with the pad of a slow dance. When I first started I used to follow a pattern. I’d cut the grass in long straight lines winding back and forth from top to bottom and side to side until the grass had been cut, the yard clear, the job done. Then I branched out. I started making shapes like rectangles, squares, ovals and cricket pitches. I stopped thinking it was a chore and thought of it as something else. A release for the mind.

It’s like cutting the kid’s hair. Five different heads, thick, wispy, curly, straight and spiky. Whorls and crowns, cowlicks and fringes. When they were little I bought fine steel scissors and learnt to trim and shape. They sat on a chair in the kitchen or if it was fine we went outdoors. I knelt and stooped behind them. Snip comb snip as I listened to their chatter or told stories to keep them still. Fifteen years in the trade until they tired of my slowness and went off to hairdressers and I lost my job. I stopped cutting until I discovered the mower.

I push the machine under the ivy and remember the morning we found the puppies. Ten tiny bodies wriggling in the dark warmth and in the mother’s eyes a brightness that surprised me. I mow behind the tool shed and see the place where the kids found a blackbird’s nest. In the middle of some bougainvillea hanging over the back fence they propped up a ladder and took turns spying on the eggs. I notice too there’s a mixture of grasses to explore. A patch of baby tears by the bedroom windows, thin seedy blades under the clothesline and spongy thickness near the apricot tree.

I met the man from across the road when I started mowing. I watched in the beginning as he pushed the machine across the nature strip and rolled the mower over and over the lawn whilst his son waited for him on the driveway. Not many weeks later the boy took over the mowing and his father walked around and picked up twigs that had blown off the trees. He dropped them on the footpath or placed them in little heaps amongst the shrubs. It was then that I learnt he had Alzheimer’s disease. As the months went by I saw him often wandering by himself, sometimes in his pyjamas standing by the letter box. He didn’t know me any more. And then a gardening service appeared and the boy told me his dad had moved into a hostel.

The last place I mow is beneath the ash tree with its roots running all over the place like fingers groping up through the earth. The blades grind the tops of the wood with gashes and bruises and after that it’s finished. The lawns are done. I stand underneath the clothes line and watch the birds sifting and scattering. It’s then that I remember the girl who stood behind the shed in the afternoons with a question in her head. The answer’s always green.

kate cahill

mine

mine

In the afternoons she often had a nap. sometimes I'd lie beside her on the bed and touch the soft skin of her arm or rub my leg against her slippery stockings. After a while I heard the drop in her breathing as it went down, down down like a clock winding backwards on the pillow. For twenty minutes or so, Mum was all mine.

little pictures..

Little Pictures

During the first week of term 1, I’ve been testing the children in my Prep class using a computer program that’s designed to indicate a child’s general level of achievement at the start of school. The test, made up of a series of picture screens accompanied by questions on an audio, usually lasts about twenty minutes and is carried out one-to-one while the child’s parent or caregiver waits outside the classroom door.
It begins with a sample of handwriting.
Some are quick to do this. So confident with a pencil and piece of paper that before I’ve time to click their details on the screen they’ve already finished writing their name. A mix of capital and lower case letters spread across the page neatly like a row of carriages on a train, or perhaps a swish of sticks and circles that look like musical notes. I have to check to see if every letter of the child’s name is accounted for and whether the handwriting is clear to read before giving it a mark from 0-5. Sometimes children struggle to put anything down on the paper and when this happens I crouch beside their chair and encourage them to write whatever they can remember. Often thick strokes appear that remind me of fence posts being slowly hammered into the ground. One boy comes in holding a soft toy and I watch as he tucks the animal between his tummy and the table then picks up the pencil and grips it like a big stick before sliding the grey-lead so lightly across the paper that only a thread of colour can be seen. When he finishes he puts down the pencil, hugs his penguin and hands me the paper. I find his name on the screen, click the mouse and he stuns me a couple of minutes later by reading words, sentences and then a lengthy story about Cats.





Frigglejang. Denalty. Riotous. Enterprising. Observatory. Their eyes widen and they look at me sideways as they listen then pop their mouths open and repeat these words. I’m concentrating on picking up speech difficulties such as stammers
or lisps but at the same time find myself holding back laughter at the way each one responds. There are mumbles and whispers, shouts and giggles as they roll those sounds along their tongues and out into the air. It’s as if they’re retelling little jokes that they know make no sense. One girl tilts back and forth on her tiptoes as steady as a clock whilst she identifies each letter of the alphabet. I love the certainty in her voice and the surprise in her eyes when I hand her a pointer – a chopstick- to tap on the screen. She could be Degas’ Little Dancer as she leans forwards in the sunlight and tries so hard to match the words and pictures that appear in front of her eyes.


Rockets and puppies, ice-creams and fish. They count and match, add and take away. Michael laughs when the 5 and 10 cent coins appear and he hears “Jasmine wants to buy an apple. It costs 10 cents. Which coin should she use to buy it?” “Apples don’t cost 10 cents!” he cries and I tap the mouse and hope he’ll always be this confident with what he knows.

Each child goes as far as they can with the questions and then the program cuts out.
A thin green line glides across the screen to indicate the results have been archived. Later in the day, I’ll study the information and use it to build up the big picture of the range of ability within the class group. For now though, the little picture of each one standing beside me in the corner of the classroom is all the detail I need.

for Bob

He’s standing on a ladder pruning a tree by the back fence when he slips sideways and lands heavily on the ground. Although he’s in pain, he convinces his wife to drag him on a sheet of cardboard to the back door where he hopes to pull himself up onto the steps. It takes her more than two hours to get him there but only a few minutes after that to realise the injury is worse than they thought. A short while later she calls an ambulance.
Bob and Nan are neighbours who live across the road and in the beginning there’s a chance he might not return home, that he might not walk again, as his hip’s been broken in the fall. The joint is shattered. For an 83 year old man, the situation is bleak. When we visit him in hospital a couple of days later, he’s tense and pale. He can barely move. He says he can’t sleep. Even with the pills they’ve given him, the pain’s too great. He lies on his back on a layer of pillows in the quiet, white room like a man waiting on a miracle.

He’s been able to wait before. During the second world war he sheltered for some hours in a waterway beneath his parents house in Holland while Nazi officers searched the rooms above and the streets nearby looking for young men for the work camps. Bob stayed calm. “I was wet through,” he says, “but I had to keep still. For everyone’s sake I didn’t move.”

He’s also told me of a time his canoe capsized in Westernport bay and he clung to wreckage with his son-in-law before swimming three kilometres across a cold, deep channel to the shore. They reached French Island after midnight, walked barefoot across rocks and mud and sheltered in a disused guard house until they were found.

Bob begins moving about on his legs again, slowly and with great effort but enough for him to be transferred to a rehabilitation centre. After a couple of weeks there, his son brings him home. He’s given a large wheeled walking frame to help him get about the house but it is unwieldy and Bob is tired and he spends most of the day in the lounge room lying on a foam mattress on the couch. It’s hard to see him like this. He is a man who has always been busy with a chisel or drill in his hands. Now the slow pace of his recovery reduces his day to coffee cups and long pauses while he adjusts pillows and positions. Sometimes when we’re talking he finds it difficult to remember words and says his English is not as good as it used to be. He remembers things by thinking in Dutch and then converting back to English.. “De-arg-nosis” he says, “it’s like your diagnosis” and he uses that term to tell me how the local doctor has always been correct when treating both him and his wife “He’s a good man” . We swap a line from an old song, Que sera sera that he asks me to find in one of the dictionaries he keeps in a cabinet. Que sera sera, what will be will be. He likes that phrase he says, because it gives him a good attitude.

Over the next month or so, a little more mobility returns and Bob begins walking to the door on crutches to greet me when I come. .He tells me his plan, how he’s setting his sight on being a lot better “in a little while.” “By degree,” he says “it’ll happen by degree.” But he’s not always so positive.

When Easter comes and there’s not much change in his condition, he says he wonders how patient he can be. “I’m an impatient man” he tells me. “I want to be doing things, not sitting around all day. I like to do things for myself.”



His hip has mended as much as it can but it seems that in the process of his moving about the joint has been forced higher than it should be and now the socket is unable to take much weight. He finds it impossible to stand for more than a couple of minutes without experiencing intense pain. One leg is now permanently shorter than the other. An operation for a hip replacement is the next thing to consider.

He’s worried about Nan too. When she leaves the room to get something from the kitchen, he says she can no longer read and that she tells him there are wavy lines at the corners of her vision.
“I’ve got to look after her.”
Then yesterday morning, a little more than six months after the fall, he phones and asks if it will be alright to visit. I make a cake and straighten up the lounge room. I wonder if the couch will be too soft for him. At 2.30 the bell rings and when I answer it, find them both there, hats and coats on, standing at the door like two pale sunflowers. Nan is holding a packet of Dutch chocolates and Bob leaning on his crutches beside her is carrying a plant for the garden.
It is a triumphant sight.