Never mind. It has endured the same each winter and come through. If it had a mind, it would doubtless wish you in the first category as well. But that is a matter of secondary importance, when there is work to be done.
Before operations begin, our man will scout the terrain. Consciously or unconsciously, he will sense that the grass beneath his feet has lost the flabby inertness of its dormancy. There is a spring to it. It is quickening with restored life. Its lustre, the sprouting of the daisies and clover, simultaneously gladden his heart and remind him of his duty. He is most unlikely to stop and ponder why this should be; what it is within him that is fulfilled by the annual taking up of the challenge. He has neither the time nor the inclination to analyse the nature of the drama. There is a lawn to be mowed.
Now, for the first time, we hear the Saturday music of the mower. As sound, it is horrible: loud, discordant, disconnected, structureless. But to those of the faith there is a mysterious sweetness to it. Familiarity annihilates its brutishness, leaving its rhythms, its pauses, its cadences, its crescendos and diminuendos, to exercise their role as indispensable accompaniment to the ritual.
In the case of the push mower and the electric mower, sound and purposeful action come together. But for the petrol-driven mower, there is an overture, initiated by the pulling of the starter rope or cranking of the handle. With first-category devotees, this will be brief: an introductory bar consisting of a couple of smooth pulls, before the rich orchestra of the motor adds its throaty weight. For second-category worshippers, the overture may well be protracted; indeed, it may well be the prelude, not to mowing the lawn at all, but to a hurried dash to the repair shop, a thoroughly unfruitful exchange with an overburdened mechanic, and a day of painful non-consummation.
But this day we will have none of that. The cutters are unclogged, the layers of old muck prized off, the oil checked, the petrol tank filled. The handle is pulled once, twice, three times. The wheel revolves lifelessly. The flow of fuel is checked, the plug cleaned. The rope is yanked in earnest, with a silent prayer that it will not – as has been known – snap in the middle. Now there is, at last, an answering cough, like that of a half-drowned man. It dies, and there are further twiddlings with accelerator and choke. Again the rope is pulled, and this time the music of returning life is heard. Smoke belches, black as impurities are incinerated, then blue. With the depression of the accelerator, the volume increases. The cutters are engaged and the music acquires breadth and depth, as when the tubas and trombones join the orchestra.
For a moment our man is held by the sound, and by the power transmitted from the engine through the handles to his forearms. These forces enclose him, shutting him off from the world of bird song, barking dogs, aeroplanes, his squealing children, a wife who would trouble him with shopping lists or holiday brochures. He grips the handles tight, and guides the machine towards the grass. As he meets the lawn, the cutters engage. The first shower, lush and juicy, shoots forth into the box, emerald spattered with the white of the daisies. But our man’s appreciation of the aesthetics is unconscious. His intelligence is focussed on the line he must follow.
The creation of the pattern is central to the ritual. One of the old textbooks recommends that the most pleasing effect is achieved by starting with the outer circumference, and mowing in a continuous, decreasing circuit until the centre is reached and shorn. But that requires what few of us have, a lawn shaped in the shape of a symmetrical oval or circle. Our man observes orthodox practice. He executes two careful circuits of the outer edge to give himself a margin, and once the furthest curve permits, he cuts across it in the first straight lines. As he moves into the main body of the lawn, the lines become longer. It is in the sculpting of those lines that his spirit receives much of its nourishment. Here is rhythm, regularity, the measured tread behind the devouring machine, the sweeping turn at each end as the whizzing blades slice the air within inches of the heads of flowers or the buds of shrubs, before the controlled flourish is completed and it is back to the straight and narrow. And all the time the proportion of the grass which has succumbed to our man’s control appreciably and visibly grows, and that left in its quasi-natural state diminishes.
By the time he halts the machine to empty the box for the first time, the comforting familiarity of the ritual has reclaimed him. He may put his nostrils close to the damp mass of cuttings, inhale that fresh, innocent smell which speaks to him of his history as a mower and the lawns he has mown. His pleasure is conscious now, as he marches the old route to his compost heap, lying in mouldering peace in some unregarded corner of his domain, and lays the season’s first bright offering over the tea leaves, coffee grinds, potato peel and cabbage stalks. He may pause a moment to spread the cuttings, thinking how many more times he will perform this office before the season of growth is out. Before he is finished this day, that deposit will be buried deep, its greenness yielding to yellow and grey as the bacteria go to work.
Back to his waiting machine our man strides. A quick push or two on the accelerator – whose results are audible half way down the street – and he is off again. See how the beast eats up the ground, while his feet fall with firm, noiseless tread on the beheaded blades. The flower bed looms, but he does not begin the turn until full contiguity with his previous stripe is accomplished. The faded daffodil heads will surely be lost; but no, he sweeps in a circle, tilting back the snarling cutters, easing back on the accelerator, his body following in a disciplined arc. And the next stripe is laid.
Thus, by measurable degree, the task is performed. Somewhere deep inside our man, a need is answered. Were he to be questioned, he would mumble something about having to keep the place tidy. His machine has brought order to the lawn; he orders the machine. A psychologist might identify a different order of precedence among the elements of man, machine and herbage; wondering who or what was really in control, who was whose servant, who whose master; might search deeper still, into the possible symbolism of the stripes, recollections of marks inflicted or suffered in school canings, sublimations of flagellistic or masochistic urges. Our man’s need might be inadequacy, his desire for control an obsession, his adherence to ritual a mask for a pathetic deficiency of self-esteem.
What is beyond dispute is that, for whatever jumble of reasons, when the mowing is finished that April morning our man will be contented. He hurls the last boxful of cuttings on to the now gently steaming heap, and turns back to view with quiet complacency the effect of his stripes. He silences his machine and returns it to its place of rest, perhaps offering a tribute to its dependability as he wipes the cutters clean with an oily rag. He throws down his gloves, with their new stains of green, beats off the spattering of grass attached to his shins, stamps his feet, becomes aware again of the extraordinary amount of noise birds make. He is ready to do battle in the supermarket, welcome a tiresome guest, play football with a clamorous son, attend to his beloved; to pick up again his spot in the society of human beings. He is strengthened by what he has done; and a good part of his comfort lies in the fact that – whether or not he is conscious of it at that moment – he must do the same next week, and the week after that, and every week until the earth again tires of making things grow.
Care must be taken that the lawn is of such a size that about it in a square can be planted every sweet-smelling herb. Upon the lawn, too, against the heat of the sun, trees should be planted, so the lawn may have a delightful, cooling shade
ALBERTUS MAGNUS, Count of Bollstadt
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