Archive for » January, 2008 «

At one time during my childhood, my mother, siblings, and I used to regularly attend Sunday service. With that weekly dose of holiness, my mother was certain that her children were oozing purity from every pore.

My brother was whipping my sister in the head with a pussy willow on the drive home from church one morning when he gave pause to ask, “Hey Mom, why don’t they give out palms on Palm Sunday?”

“They do,” my mother replied. “They were out of palms by the time we got to the altar. All they had left were the pussy willows.”

My brother thought about that for a moment. Then, with all the innocence of a child who has not yet received a proper public school education (or at least never read the backseat of the bus), he asked, “Well, if they always have enough pussy willows, why don’t they just call it Pussy Sunday?”

My brother, the atheist, bringing people back to the church.

Mom was never really fond of yard work. To be honest, there were parts of the backyard where she’d prefer never to venture. But after Dad’s second back surgery, all of the physically strenuous chores became her responsibility. She would have been glad for help, but her children were still far too young for hard physical labor (we were only old enough to work in sweat shops at the time). And so she inherited the arduous task of mowing the lawn.

The job wouldn’t have been nearly as loathsome if we had a nice, flat yard. Unfortunately, very little of our property was flat. We lived, more or less, in the middle of the slope of a hill. Other than the area leveled off enough to build a house on, the yard was a huge bank of earth. Our backyard was informally divided into two parts. There was the bottom lot — a narrow strip of coveted level land where we were allowed to play as children — and there was the top lot — the peak of our slope (slightly leveled off) where our swimming pool and fruit trees were located. For some reason the grass grew unusually fast on the top lot, which prompted a deadly fear in my mother. Because, as anybody who lives in a rural, wooded area knows, where there is tall grass, there are snakes.

My mother’s fear of snakes borders on phobic. It took no less than hypnotherapy, an iron will, and an act of God to get her to mow the tall grass. In the end she suffered through it only because she refused to surrender her pool to the local wildlife (who used it as their personal watering hole). Mom was mowing the top lot on the day the lawn mower wound up in the tree.

Between the top lot and the bottom lot, the slope is so steep that it is impossible to mow with any regard for safety. No grass grows there anyway. That area is covered in a thick tangle of vegetation. On the day the lawn mower wound up in the tree, my mother was perilously close to the edge of this slope, trying to neatly trim the lawn right up to its border.

Suddenly she saw a movement a few feet in front of her. Whether it was, in fact, a snake or merely a cricket, the wind, or a wild manifestation of her paranoid mind, we’ll never know. But whatever it was, it startled my mother and knocked her off balance. With her center of gravity compromised, the lawn mower threatened to drag her down the hill towards whatever evil had frightened her in the first place. Unwillingly to risk life and limb (or to come face to face with whatever was living in the greenery), my mother let go of the lawn mower and hoped it would arrive at the bottom of the hill intact.

The lawn mower had loftier goals.

Usually the mower would smash into a rock on the way down (oh yes, this was not the first time this happened) and wind up broken (earning my mother a break from mowing the lawn until my dad could fix it). But on this special day, the lawn mower picked up astounding speed, hit some unlikely natural ramp, and launched itself into the top of a tree at the bottom of the hill.

Despite viewing the backdrop of the slope that aided it (and having a general knowledge of the force of gravity), the lawn mower up the tree was an awesome sight. We admired it and marveled at it.

. . . Mostly because we weren’t the ones that would have to get it down.