“It looks like it is going to rain.”
“I need to mow the lawn, too.”
Twenty minutes go by …
“Where is that rain?”
“I bet you could mow the lawn before it gets here.”
Who needs those extra 20 minutes, anyway?
So I mowed. Or chopped. The backyard was threatening to get out of control. There was the top-mow, the cross-mow and the clipping-mow. Parts of the backyard did take all three passes. All that nice green stuff reduced to a lot less.
It was sticky and humid. For a while, for variety, we tried humid and sticky. I felt two raindrops.
Doing the backyard is plenty of exertion for my shoulder. I did manage to turn it into a nice stretching exercise, but I can only take so much. Besides, the clouds were changing, so I put away the mower, moved the clipping bags to their appropriate location and closed up the house.
After a shower, and before I could finish my sandwich at lunch, the monsoon arrived. It knocked out the power. We sat quietly in the semi-dark. The clouds were a thick and foreboding gray. I began to wonder if the battery in my phone could last forever, because tonight, two thousand one two party over, oops, out of time, tonight we’re gonna party like it’s eighteen ninety-nine.
The rain picked up. This was now good napping weather. I listened to the water rush off the roof and found myself wondering how far I could stretch our food supplies if they forgot to connect our street back to the grid.
Two hours later I woke up. The power was back on. Life had returned to normal.
The grass in the backyard was twice as tall as this morning.
The rest of the evening was spent working on lectures and schedules and various other detailed things. I wrote gobs of emails. We had a delicious dinner based on vegetables and shrimp. It rained some more.
I had to tie a rope around my waist to find my way back in from the backyard, where we now have a gently burbling brook.
Mowing the lawn this morning was entirely worth it.
