Now where was I? Oh, right -- dazed babble.
For real, there's been far too much of that. I'll be on the phone with a friend or hanging out with someone, I'll realize my conversation is veering all over the place, me interrupting the other person far too often. For no good reason, sounding mighty unfocused.
Ah, well, it'll pass.
Meanwhile, if you've waded through many of this journal's earlier Vermont entries, you've gotten the idea that there's a whole lot of grass cutting to do here during the warm season. Enough to get me out with the mower for an hour or so most days of the week. A power mower. Loud. Loud enough that it got me way tired of programming in a daily dose of that kind of noise.
Somewhere during recent months an ad for manual lawn mowers caught my attention, I found myself checking out websites that peddle them. Not a practical idea, the push-mower thing, for most of the cutting that needs to be done around here, but appealing for working right around the house. Genuinely, surprisingly appealing. And one day, after a drawn-out process of inner debate, I found myself doing the deal, forking over credit card cash for a brand new mower. UPS dropped it off shortly before my return, I found its components waiting for me in a big white carton covered with assembly instructions and happy pro-product propaganda.
It's a different animal from the push mower my parents made me use around our teeny quarter-acre lot during my younger years of indentured servitude. A high-tech low-tech machine, if you get my drift. Simply made. Light. Efficient. Not needing big expenditures of calories or ergs (assuming the grass being mown isn't eight, ten inches long). Requiring slightly more effort than the power mower to get it going, but not much. Producing hardly any noise, and what sound it makes is strangely agreeable. Almost musical compared with the blaring roar of the power-mower.
It got its first run the day after my return, after 36 hours of little sleep and many miles traveled. Probably not the time to attempt something like this: the grass too long, me too tired, too impatient. I switched to the power rig, left it at that. Until a few days ago, when the lawn around the house had recovered to a point of needing another cut. Pulled out the push mower, got to work. And found myself enjoying it, a sensation that felt almost perverse, considering the activity.
Used it again yesterday out here in the yard off this side of the house, the work comfortably low-effort, bizarrely pleasant. Meditative at times. Me cutting away, the mower producing its quiet sound, in no way obscuring cricket noise or the singing of birds.
Weird. Far too tranquilly rustic. But clearly a match for my current slightly-buzzed, abstracted state of mind. Should I be worried about that?
******************
Yesterday, not far from here, beneath a June sky:
Madrid, te echo de menos.
rws 1:31 PM [+]
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