Cancer Journal #44 August 9

 

Mowing the Lawn

I lived the first 14 years of my life in rural Alaska.  Life was not fancy in Alaska in the 1950s.  The land in front of our house (I don’t think it deserved the dignity of being called a yard) never felt the cruel blade of the lawn mower.  Priorities were elsewhere.  

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s when my family moved to the Midwest (In Alaska, we paradoxically referred to it as “Outside”) that I came to know the angry drone of a four stroke lawn mower engine.  I didn’t love it then and I still don’t—either how it sounds or what it represents.  A taste for outdoor tidiness must be acquired at an early age.  I hear “No Mow May,” my heart gladdens.  My neighbor hears the phrase, a look of profound concern comes over his face.  Although our lawn does get mowed, we are haphazard and tardy.  I sense the effort of my neighbor not to pass judgement, good man that he is. 

I drive out in the country and now and then, I see a place that would fit right in in Alaska.  All sorts of stuff around the place, the corpse of a washing machine, the deteriorated remains of a sofa, a spring powered rocking horse that has given its last ride and is now put out to pasture, Palomino weathering into white.  Various other stuff.  And, of course it’s, No Mow Any Time, Anywhere.  I see that place and it feels so right, so like home after long absence.  

I drive further down the road and see a vast expanse of closely cut green uniformity surrounding a house and I ask, “People, what are you doing?”  No evidence that they have a three hole golf course or a croquet set or even badminton.  Just two or three acres of tidy pointlessness.  I'm sure it's there because of a riding lawn mower. This was not the work of a push mower, self propelled or otherwise.  Must be in competition with some snipped Green Acres down the road.

I think of the senseless release of carbon dioxide and global warming but there has to be an Alaskan part of me that is bothered too.  “Get goats, folks!”  That’s the only way grass gets that short where I come from.  And, you know, it looks better with goats.  It just does.

This is what I submitted for my most recent Writer's Group. Some might ask, "What's this got to do with cancer? Well, I put "Cancer" and "Lawn mowing" into Google Search and they reported 14,100,000 hits. You might respond, "That proves very little" and I shrug my shoulders and say, "That's the best I got."

Back when I worked as an Administrative Law Judge, my colleagues would marvel at how lame an argument was that an attorney had made at a hearing. I responded that if you don't have a good argument to make, you make a bad argument. It is in that vein that I report the Google hits. And 14,100,000 is a lot of hits.