12 June 2014
Today I missed the boys who used to live next door. Two teenagers with their parents. They were immensely helpful when I needed something like my Lawnmower Put Into the Trunk (where it barely fits), or something gnarly cut down, or a strange-sized object carried into the house.
When I first moved in, and they were young lads, one of them told me they watched me through the window laughing as I was figuring out (all day) how to make my raised garden beds with 2x8s and a saw and a drill and a screwdriver AND a level.
I wanted each bed utterly level, and then level with each other, so I built up the ground in one area to make it so. And I took all day.
"You laughed at me?" I said, "Instead of coming out to help me?!"
I didn't really care because I loved my little project, no matter how inept I looked at doing it, but Jake took it to heart.
The next week he came by and Mowed My Lawn For Me. Awww. He didn't want to be pegged a laugher. (His dad did censure him when he thought I wasn't in earshot. "Why are you mowing Her lawn when ours is not mowed?!" But the son got the neighborliness trait from his dad who was just as nice and helpful and one winter pulled the cord on my snow blower 40 times before we remembered there was a toggle to close off the gas, which needed to be toggled ON... And then it started on the first pull, when toggled to ON. If he had been 10 years older I would have worried about bringing on a heart attack from all of that engine cord pulling for naught in below zero Wisconsin. It's one of those terrible situations that we would have laughed at later at a neighborhood picnic if we had remembered to. The first snow of 2008 when Chuck almost laid in the snow and died after 57 pulls on the engine cord of Susan's snowblower while it was still in OFF mode.
So today, as I wrastled a 4'x8' sheet of plywood, mysteriously part of my garage items for the last eight years, onto the driveway and into the mouth of my trunk, I missed the neighbors. (There are other neighbors as helpful and more - I have the best neighborhood on earth - but their yards were strangely still in the 15 minute window of time I had to put said lawnmover into the trunk.) I, with neither laughing nor helpful teenagers looking on (that I know of), rolled the lawn mower UP the dangerously thin makeshift ramp, and witnessed it bow near the point of breaking under the heftiness, and I hooked the front wheels over the edge of the trunk and then slid the whole thing easily in. All without Jake from next door. Jake who is now out of high school and would have proudly lifted the thing single-handedly from the ground in one motion and plopped it into the trunk and never thought twice about his back until he was 53 and feeling that one funny disc.
I remarked to myself, and to the robin in her nest above the garage and under the deck, who did not appreciate my activity beneath her one bit, that it was deceptively easy to get a lawnmower into a trunk when a person has saved a 4x8 sheet of plywood she will "never use" and all of the neighbors are inside having early dinners.
When I first moved in, and they were young lads, one of them told me they watched me through the window laughing as I was figuring out (all day) how to make my raised garden beds with 2x8s and a saw and a drill and a screwdriver AND a level.
I wanted each bed utterly level, and then level with each other, so I built up the ground in one area to make it so. And I took all day.
"You laughed at me?" I said, "Instead of coming out to help me?!"
I didn't really care because I loved my little project, no matter how inept I looked at doing it, but Jake took it to heart.
The next week he came by and Mowed My Lawn For Me. Awww. He didn't want to be pegged a laugher. (His dad did censure him when he thought I wasn't in earshot. "Why are you mowing Her lawn when ours is not mowed?!" But the son got the neighborliness trait from his dad who was just as nice and helpful and one winter pulled the cord on my snow blower 40 times before we remembered there was a toggle to close off the gas, which needed to be toggled ON... And then it started on the first pull, when toggled to ON. If he had been 10 years older I would have worried about bringing on a heart attack from all of that engine cord pulling for naught in below zero Wisconsin. It's one of those terrible situations that we would have laughed at later at a neighborhood picnic if we had remembered to. The first snow of 2008 when Chuck almost laid in the snow and died after 57 pulls on the engine cord of Susan's snowblower while it was still in OFF mode.
So today, as I wrastled a 4'x8' sheet of plywood, mysteriously part of my garage items for the last eight years, onto the driveway and into the mouth of my trunk, I missed the neighbors. (There are other neighbors as helpful and more - I have the best neighborhood on earth - but their yards were strangely still in the 15 minute window of time I had to put said lawnmover into the trunk.) I, with neither laughing nor helpful teenagers looking on (that I know of), rolled the lawn mower UP the dangerously thin makeshift ramp, and witnessed it bow near the point of breaking under the heftiness, and I hooked the front wheels over the edge of the trunk and then slid the whole thing easily in. All without Jake from next door. Jake who is now out of high school and would have proudly lifted the thing single-handedly from the ground in one motion and plopped it into the trunk and never thought twice about his back until he was 53 and feeling that one funny disc.
I remarked to myself, and to the robin in her nest above the garage and under the deck, who did not appreciate my activity beneath her one bit, that it was deceptively easy to get a lawnmower into a trunk when a person has saved a 4x8 sheet of plywood she will "never use" and all of the neighbors are inside having early dinners.
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