I don’t speed through the subdivision. There are too many kids and pets and caterpillars crawling across the road. Why did the caterpillar cross the road? Maybe I’ll save that joke for another time. Here and now, I need to tell you about the old man.
Before I begin, I should give you a bit of history from my upbringing. Mom had always said, “Everyone has a story.” She said a lot of other cliches and quick phrases, as I’m sure we’ll touch on at some point in the future; but in the meantime, we’ll stay focused-ish.
What my mom may or may not know is that if I don’t know a person’s story, well, I make it up. This kind of story creativity can happen anywhere or at any time. The grocery store. The airport. While on a date with my spouse of twenty plus years. Because there’s nothing like making up stories to keep a relationship alive and active. Shall I move on?
Driving twenty miles an hour through the far end of the subdivision, I see an old man moving rocks to front edge of his lawn. And when I say old man, I’m not referring to fifty-year-old. I’m saying old, as in ancient, as in, OMG, he needs to sit in a recliner, smoke a cigar, and wait for Death to come a knockin’, kind of old. He was far beyond wrinkled. His wrinkles had wrinkles. Because he used his old arthritic hands to move boulders, I’d guess he was born prior to the industrial revolution. (That’s around the later 18th century for those of you who don’t feel like looking the time period up.) Okay, obviously the old man wasn’t that old unless he time traveled forward to the latter 21st century and became best friends with the Artificial Intelligence scientific community… I’m digressing.
Day one. He moved large caramel colored rocks with a wheel barrow to the space around his mail box at the end of his driveway. He wore jeans, a light gray collared shirt, and no gloves.
Day two I walked past his home while walking the dogs. The old man’s clothes didn’t change, but his to-do list did. He used a straight edged shovel to remove his once-lawn, now covered and consumed by weeds. One shoveled row at a time, he dug up the grass and placed it into the same old wheel barrow that held large rocks the day before.
Day three. The old man rented or borrowed or purchased a lawn remover device. It wasn’t electric or gas run. It had more of a look of a machine engineered around his proposed birth, the 18th century. He held the grip, one handle in each hand, and he pushed. This way, the weeded grass lifted and rolled as he used his three-hundred-year-old body to wiggle and move the mechanical device back and forth, and side to side.
Day four through seven. He finished the weeding of his lawn by completely removing the lawn, which is now dirt.
Day eight. The old man used some kind of pitch fork, but with thicker prongs to turn the remaining dirt.
Day nine. He wheeled the rolled sod in the old wheel barrow from the middle of his cement drive way to its designated area on the leveled dirt.
I think his story goes like this: His wife died three months ago. They had been married for sixty-one years. Thirty of those years, she nagged him about the yard. She was born poor, lived in a broken, wooden home on farm land that was too expensive to sow. When she met the man of her dreams, and before she said “Yes” she told the man that she’d dreamed of living in a real house, one where the plumbing worked and the poop tank didn’t back up. But most of all, she wanted to sit on her porch and watch the sun flowers grow.
Except, he was too busy working. She never got her dream yard.
In the first two months after she was buried in the town’s cemetery, he sat in his blue, cigar and sweat stained recliner. It was the same one his passed wife wanted to throw in the garbage twenty years ago. He fought her then, saying it was the most comfortable thing in the house. He doesn’t think that anymore. All he thinks about now is how much he took his beloved for granted and wished he told her the truth. That she was the most comfortable thing in his life and she left without knowing how much he loved her.
He stood up from that beat-up chair, carried it to the sidewalk, and left it for the garbage crew to pick up. The old man bought a porch swing. And when he set it up, he looked at his pathetic weed-lawn. He would give his beloved wife of sixty-one years the landscape she’d always dreamed of…Even if she wasn’t here to see it.
And that’s his story.