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