TouchedByMadness

The Lawn Mower Up the Tree Story

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.

Their Eyes Were Watching Girls

I became an entertainer at the age of nine.

That year we moved from Undiscovered Ghetto of the All American Valley to Quietsville, USA. The first thing we noticed (other than the notable absence of a crack house) was that the people in our new neighborhood were completely different from our former neighbors . . . even if you ignored the fact that our former neighbors were dealers, addicts, hookers, and unmedicated whackjobs. When we lived on our old street, everyone around us was young enough to run from the cops (who made regular visits). Our new neighbors, however, were just . . . old.

For awhile I was entirely convinced that our parents had moved us into a retirement community. I was disappointed in the quality of the place because I expected more Jell-O. Every now and then the decaying woman in the house next door would call and complain to my mother that her three children (there were only three of us then) should not be allowed to play in the backyard during the afternoon hours because we continually woke up her husband from his nap.

It was when we were banished to the front yard to jump rope or play hopscotch in the driveway that we noticed them. At first it was just Amel, the eighty-something year old man who lived directly across the street from us. Every day he’d plop a lawn chair on his front walk and stare at our house.

“He’s watching us!” we complained to our mother, but she insisted we were paranoid and that the old man probably couldn’t even see that far, and sent us back out to play.

In the following weeks, Amel was joined by Norman (his next door neighbor), and Joe (our next door neighbor). With a combined age of approximately 232, they were a fiery trio. Every afternoon, Norman and Joe would trod over to Amel’s house with their lawn chairs. Then the three amigos would crack open some Budweisers and stare at our house.

“They’re watching us!” we complained to our mother. Again she insisted it was nonsense, that the gentlemen were merely sitting outside, enjoying the weather, and sharing old people gossip.

That’s what she said until the day she got the lawnmower stuck up a tree (another story entirely) and the old men laughed so hard that one nearly had to give himself oxygen and another almost fell off his chair and broke a hip. Mom stormed back into the house. “I can’t work with those geezers watching me,” she huffed.

My brother, who was three at the time, decided to make the best of his audience. Our front yard was a steep embankment that ended near the road with a four foot stone wall. Little brother would hop on his Big Wheels and ride it down the embankment, swerving just before arriving at the stone wall (and subsequent four foot drop into the street). Each time he pulled this little stunt, the elderly trio would jump up and attempt to scurry their brittle bones across the road to catch Evel Knievel before he became a smear on the pavement. I’m pretty sure we witnessed a heart attack because of this game, but I was too young to recognize one.

My sister also used public appearances to her favor. Whenever she was in trouble (for say, kicking a hole in the bedroom wall) she’d run out onto the front lawn to receive her punishment.

“Go ahead and beat me!” she’d yell at my mother. “Hit me. Come on! These people will call DCF on you and you’ll go to jail!” (FYI, my mother never beat her children. My sister could be a tad melodramatic.)

“Stupid, they’re old people,” I’d hiss at her. “They’ll take out their wooden spoons and help!”

Ah, yes. Never a dull moment.

We grew older, and so did they, but after their naps, Amel, Norman, and Joe would faithfully set up their chairs across from our house. I suppose that’s what happens when you can’t afford cable (and competitive cheerleading on ESPN).

Today my childhood home is no longer its own reality show. My family isn’t any less interesting, but Amel, Norman, and Joe have long since passed on. Sometimes I think that wherever they are in the afterlife ether, they may be looking down on us.

And it still creeps me out.

In Trouble in a Flash

When I was four years old, I informed my parents that I was going to school. If any tears were shed that first day, they were my mother’s. I happily plopped myself down in a tiny chair and dismissed her: “Ok, Mom, you can go shopping now.”

I don’t know what I expected from the Kindergarten experience. I had known my letters (uppercase and lowercase) since I was eighteen months old. I was trying to read by two. I knew right from left. If I hoped for a challenge, there was none to be found. Except for shoe tying, which I made my parents teach me the same day I was humiliated by my sense of failure. It was all their fault, I informed them. They always bought me shoes with buckles.

Academically, Kindergarten was a bore, so I found other means to amuse myself. My mother would tell you this is why she picked me up from the principal’s office every day. I believe that my mother grossly exaggerates the facts. I have no recollection of spending most of the school year in the principal’s office. And even if I did, I deny being in trouble. Because, you see, bad kids sat at the “Shame Shame Desk” and I couldn’t have ever been sent to the Shame Shame Desk. I’m certain of that because it was permanently occupied by Claudia. I remember nothing else about Claudia, except that clearly she was the naughty little girl.

Now, I won’t claim that I never went to the principal’s office. Because it’s simply not true. I did spend a fair amount of time there due to my attempts to entertain myself. Most of my punishable offenses occurred during nap time. There was no AM/PM Kindergarten. We went to school full days. Somebody decided that it was necessary for us to nap for a portion of the afternoon. Maybe my teacher needed a break . . . or at least a martini, but I didn’t require rest time. I never slept but once, and I swear that woman drugged me. When another student finally woke me up, I got the sense that nap had long since been over. It was probably the happiest day of my educator’s life.

Anyway, generally nap time was the perfect time for me to create a disturbance. One day I was off my mat trying to catch a bug. Another day I started screaming that Stephanie was eating green spiders from under the stage. And then there was the flashing incident.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, perhaps quite innocently, but I discovered one afternoon that boys found undershirts hilarious. Well, once I realized I had a captive audience, I was pulling my shirt up and down repeatedly to elicit those squeals of delight. First I would lift my top slowly, coy and calculating. Then I’d feign surprise. “Oh my God! You can see my undergarments!” I’d pull my shirt back down quickly and blush with maiden shame. It got roars of laughter every time.

Who knows how long this went on before the teacher realized we were having way too much fun for sleeping children. I was perfecting the nuances of my shocked expression when I heard her call my name. I walked over to her slowly, my head hanging.

“Why were you lifting your shirt up?” she asked.

“I had some lint itching me,” I said to my shoes.

“Let me see your tongue,” she commanded.

We were regularly warned that if we told lies, black spots would appear on our tongues. I believed this wholeheartedly . . . until the day I told the truth and still wound up with a black spot. In that instant I realized that there never were any telltale marks to report our sins. The teacher had been lying to catch liars! The hypocrisy sickened me. I wanted to jump up on a chair, point at her and yell, “Mrs. Winnick is full of shit!”

On the day of the flashing incident, however, I believed in the black spot more strongly than I believed in Santa Claus, so I stuck out my tongue quickly before the mark had a chance to appear.

I think, I think I was sent back to my mat unpunished. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect that if I had wound up in the office for my antics, my mother would still today be regaling strangers with the story of the nap time striptease at our fine Catholic elementary school.

And Yet We Came Out Smelling Like Roses

When I was nine years old, my uncle married his second wife - a hard woman who didn’t seem to like kids.

To be perfectly honest, we weren’t all that fond of her either.

One day my uncle and his new wife were visiting when she began to share details of the glory of having a fireplace - the elegance, the ambiance. How truly blessed she was to have this marvelous centerpiece to fill her family with the holiday spirit.

But did we know what would make sitting beside her exquisite fireplace a total sensory experience? She only wished that she had some fresh pine cones to burn with the logs. The aroma of the pine cones would certainly ensure a Hallmark Christmas. Such a shame that there were no pine trees in her yard.

Of course, our yard was full of pine trees. Pine trees wherever you looked. My mother invited our aunt to take as many pine cones as she pleased. Which would have been well and good if said aunt trekked around the yard collecting those pine cones in an old K-mart bag herself, but that’s not what happened. My sister and I were appointed to the job.

I’m sure there were protests. “It’s too cold!” “I’m busy making Lite Brite art!” “Are we even getting paid for this?” “I want to talk to my Union rep!” As you might expect, we still wound up outside in the frigid winter air with plastic bags in hand.

There comes a time when complaining won’t get you anywhere. You’ve just got to suck it up and accept the hand you’ve been dealt. Well, we didn’t stop complaining, but we did trudge up the hill to where the pine cones lay.

The most abhorrent aspect of the task was not that we were freezing our sweet little asses off, nor that we had become slave labor for a relative we didn’t even like. The worst part was that our dog, perhaps also enamored of the aroma of spruces and firs, did his business under those trees. While it was thoughtful of him to shit in the one part of the yard that was the universal symbol of an air freshener, it meant that my sister and I had to be mindful of where we stepped. My parents called this stretch of lawn the “mine field,” and with good reason.

As I hopscotched around questionable mounds of dirt in search of those precious pine cones, I suddenly had a deliciously evil idea.

“Hey,” I called to my sister, who was busy trying to distinguish the cones from the frozen turds.

“What?”

“Remember what she said she wanted the pine cones for?”

“To make the fireplace smell nice.”

“Riiiiiight . . .”

We reentered the house that evening with cold, flushed cheeks and full shopping bags. We presented the fruit of our labor to our uncle’s wife, and even managed to be pleasant and well-mannered. Clearly the fresh air had done us some good.

As we ran off to play, we finally let the satisfied smiles sprawl across our faces. Even as I write this, reflecting back on the vengeful brat I was, I can’t suppress a grin. It still amuses me to know that on that long ago winter night we sent home our aunt with two hefty bags of fragrant, hand-picked, shit-covered pine cones.

When Hell Freezes Over

I am ever so fortunate to live in a part of the country where it begins to snow right around Thanksgiving time. So if you’re wise enough to stay in bed on Black Friday instead of getting trampled to death at Target while making a mad dash for the DVD players, Mother Nature will send you the friendly reminder that the holiday season has begun by dumping an assload of wet white powder on your doorstep.

Sure, there was that time when I was young and I loved the snow. Those were the days when nothing brought me more joy than nailing my sister in the face with a ball of packed ice. But those childhood memories of crashing our sled into the side of the house fizzled out far too soon. Not long after we discovered we could use the shovels to bury each other alive, they were confiscated for the greater good of clearing the driveway. And since we were so eager to brandish them in the backyard, we were the ones pushing those shovels through the Great Wall left by the snow plow.

Shoveling the driveway and stairs was a chore indeed, and often took most of the morning. So you can imagine with what glee I responded to my mother when one day she met me at the door to request, “Go shovel out the elderly woman across the street.” I attempted to protest that the woman didn’t need her driveway shoveled as I had yet to see a car ever appear in it, but my mother would hear none of it. She was always awfully generous with her child labor.

Bitter and defeated, I trudged across the road, dragging my shovel behind me. With a heavy sigh, I began to clear the neighbor’s driveway. When I was halfway done, the old woman appeared at her door.

“Who are you?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

I smiled my best ‘I love puppies and Jesus and old people’ smile. “I’m Stacey. From across the street. I’m shoveling you out.”

“I didn’t ask you to shovel my driveway!” she complained.

“My mother sent me,” I responded as jovially as I could manage through gritted teeth. Believe me, lady, this wasn’t my idea.

The woman went back into the house and I returned to my work, more disgruntled than ever.

I finished the driveway and slowly made a path up the walkway. When I was nearly to her porch, the elderly woman appeared at the door again.

“Who are you?” she hissed.

“Stacey,” I repeated, thoroughly irritated by this point. “I live across the street.”

“And what do you think you’re doing?”

That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be polite. I was doing this woman a favor. I could have let her try to shovel her own sidewalk and slip and fall and break a hip. I could have left her in the snow to whine, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” Her decrepit frame could have been crystallized in ice from November until Groundhog Day. But there I was, torturing my fragile, frozen body so the mailman wouldn’t slip and sue her ass.

“Well, I seem to be shoveling your walk,” I replied with overt hostility.

“Why?!” she asked, as if terribly offended.

“Because there’s snow on it?”

I’m sure that any other old lady would have smiled benevolently, patted my head, and offered me hot cocoa, a cookie, or a quarter (cause let’s be honest, elderly people are always paying you in quarters). This woman, however, slammed the door in my face.

I heard that last week my dad shoveled out that same neighbor. She gave him forty bucks and a cup of coffee.

Figures.