Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

COLUMN
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Amy Holtz
The truth is, I’m a Minnesotan
I’ve got a thing for
mowing lawns. That’s not a
euphemism.
In Minnesota, they let you
operate heavy, dangerous,
limb-mangling machinery
from an early age. Go-karts,
snowmobiles, tractors – and
all before puberty. I’ve heard
more than once in my life
that having nine fingers is
‘character building’.
So, one of my first chores at twelve was
wielding our great gas-guzzling beast of
a lawnmower – a sacred task passed down
from generation of fathers to the next
generation. Despite being barely tall enough
to ride the rollercoasters at Valleyfair, I
took to lawnmowing like a mosquito to a
Minnesotan – a baking two-and-a-half-hour
foray into sweat and toil in the relentless
midsummer sun. We only had one small tree,
so little danger of running into anything,
which I think was the initial criteria for my
appointment. Just an endless march back
and forth, quickly across the front yard - so
no one would see me all sweaty while their
mom was driving them around in the family
minivan - and a longer, more leisurely slog
through the shimmering emerald mirage of
the backyard. And it remained a task shared
by my dad and I until my brother could
manage to roll himself out of bed by 1pm
(something he’s still working on).
The 1pm cut-off was important, because if
you weren’t several rows into the front by the
time dad rocked up, he’d passive aggressively
roll up his sleeves and pretend he was going
to start this grunt work on his hard-earned
break. Children, really, are
such a source of continual
disappointment.
Anyway, as I got older the
job became mine and I was
good at it. I had a special way
of tethering my Discman to
the waistband of my pants so
that it didn’t leap to freedom
and roll across into the
neighbours’. This was very
annoying to dad as he thought
the Discman a distraction and considered
my work less efficient, which is, of course,
the essence of the disconnect between his
generation and mine.
When he came home for lunch, just to feel
like the lawn was still his, he’d walk into
the path of the mower, waving his arms like
an old loon. It’d give me no end of silent
mirth to pretend I couldn’t see or hear him.
Invariably, he’d get so annoyed we’d end up in
a Western standoff, with him gesturing wildly
to cut the engine, shouting something utterly
pointless, like ‘you missed that bit!’ – waving
at the rest of the uncut lawn.
But now, with space a luxury rather than a
chore here, I just drag out the ritual as long
as I can on our bathtub-sized patch of soil.
There’s so many of us who linger in the task;
something so blissful about walking behind
a mower, cut-off and completely oblivious to
everyone else in the world.
You guys have really upped the stakes with
the electrical cord, too. There’s never enough
time to truly bed into my new lawn, to revel
in the peaceful monotony of its shearing. But
at least there’s the tantalizing exhilaration of a
weekly dice with death.
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