Cutting My Lawn In A Hurricane

You waited two weeks, say the neighbors to themselves, two whole weeks to let this veritable prairie grow in your yard, and now you pick now? Now? Now that it’s about to hurricane, you decide to cut the grass?

It’s true. Dark all morning, the first spit of the storm is just now carrying in on the wind. It is time for action.

Progress is a steady, unflinching process in the front yard, one damp row after another. Wet grass clumps to the blade and mattes the head of the mower, but I plow straight through. Behind me, the finished patches look like a wide-eyed young marine after his turn with the razor.

My back yard, though, is deep, dark even on a sunny day with all the tree cover, and the lawn is a woodsy salad of blue grass, clover, and broad-leafed vines hung over the wooden fence and carpeting the ground with generous leftover portions. By the time I reach it, the rain is picking up; the drops are fatter and colder. Looking up against a framed patch of polished silver sky, the drops look like shards of ice, tossed around in the wind.

Back on the green, green ground, the blade catches on a particularly wet and tangly patch. The engine coughs, loses its breath for a moment, then kicks back in. The wind whooshes. The blade catches a second time and its heart stops beating, just for a moment, before the engine-spirit takes pity, turns away from the light and decides to remain with me for a little while longer down here in the storm. A third time and it just dies.

There’s still a triangle left though, the thickest part of the whole yard, and although that vegetative cholesterol killed the engine once, I’m determined to see it devoured before the fierce part of the storm arrives. I scamper to get the gas can, pour unsteady elixir into the open, empty mouth of the engine while trying to shield the water from getting in as well, screw the cap back on with wet, grassy, gassy fingers, and pull the chord. Life!

Life, life, life. I finish the job, remembering this storm is called Irene, which is Greek for peace.