WRITING & REALITY?: Uh, Sunday

Not eloquence, as last Sunday’s walk and drive produced, but fiction, freefalling from the mind in science fiction genre.

Mother first, confirming yes, the deer have eaten from the pot of Johnny-Jump-ups. Busy day up there today, as gardeners tend the plots for those no longer able. It is Spring Cleaning day at the cemetery. Stan Makowski comes while I am there, to visit his wife, Jennie, here since 1997 and my mother’s neighbor for two years next week. Mr. Makowski is the father of a girl I went to grammar school with, but here in our church graveyard everyone knows everyone or at the very least, someone from the family, and they say hello, at least the ones who walk around; the others pretend to sleep but may be listening in so we speak softly and respectfully polite. We talk about petunias he has planted, and begonias, he claims, the deer will not eat either. He also says, that like my father, he still sees her; says it happens all the time for those that bound together here on earth. But just a glimpse; ghosts like to move from room to room and you only catch them in the hallways, in the corner of your eye, in the deep down center of your mind.

Then Dad, and two garden tractors sit half assembled in the garage. I knew this would be my job today, and resigned myself to it upon my sister’s warning that despite what was decided last fall, a new tractor to replace his old beloved, he was determined to make Old Red run again. Before I tackle the mechanical, I do a daughter thing, and make bacon and eggs for brunch. It puts us in a better mood. Then out we go, and he jacks up the tractor while I voice in tempered tones my mother’s worried remonstrations that she must have stuck inside my head before I left her to her rest and nibbling deer.

Reluctantly, I lay down on the driveway with my hands beneath the mower hovering inches above my face. One eye on the drive belt with the other ever watchful of the dangling ignition key, my father just as eager to “let’s just try it” whether his youngest child is helpless underneath or not. And I learn much more than how to tease a willful engine into life; I would not be the youngest, he is saying, if their wish to have one more had been successful. Nice, I think; a boy, it would have been a boy and he’d be lying underneath this tractor now instead of me.

Oh joy of joy I get one started after jumping its reluctant battery, and take off at rabbit speed across his lawn. I smile at him through gritted teeth as I fly by, trying to understand what he is shouting and shouting back at him that I can’t slow the damn thing down. He is pointing behind me, but I am more concerned with not running into the garden and the wall of stones he built behind it. I twist the wheel and make a U-turn, then I see it. The swath of grass I have pulled out by its roots and quickly find the lever that raises the mower deck and find the turtle on the throttle at the very same time to ease back to solid pavement, this noisy grinding giant that I hate and drove because I was more worried for my father than myself. He doesn’t know how much I hate the sound of loud and moving engines. I wouldn’t tell him for the world.

But batteries are stubborn, and I find one must be taken home and recharged. The other mower runs but doesn’t mow. I need to leave because my mind feels quite as shaven as the path I made across my father’s lawn. I say goodbye as he points and tells me that he’ll think of me each time he looks outside. Driving home, unwinding and unknotting all the separate nerve ends of my system, I see my hands upon the steering wheel, and know that I have been in the Twilight Zone, for surely there is proof: my fingernails and fingers black with motor grease.