The Wrong Box

Sometimes everything - every last detail and circumstance - is conspiring against you.  And I was realizing - laying in the sharp gravel of my driveway, my arm shoulder-deep under the mower deck and my head being swarmed by gnats, presumably attracted to the sweat that was blurring my vision as it washed the accumulated grit down my face and into my eyes - that this was one of those times.

I had already waited too long to do the first mowing of the year.  But that was nothing unusual.  Refusing to recognize the onset of spring is something I’ve practiced in relation to yard work for a number of years, and it normally works out swimmingly.  I’ve found that if you never start mowing, then yard work season hasn’t actually begun.  Therefore the time that would’ve been lost like pennies through old coat pockets, is spared from certain waste, and made available to use for checking more urgent matters off the list.  Like not mowing the lawn.

An idea occurred to me that I should probably have noticed sooner:  We had apparently gotten a decent amount of rain, because the grass was doing fairly well.   Well enough I was now having a difficult time seeing the stuff I needed to move away from the path of the mower until it was right in front of me.  Things like footballs, largish tree branches and the neighbor’s trash can lid.  In my defense, this time around,  I really hadn't been intentionally ignoring the grass.  I had just been busy.  I was being pulled in a thousand directions, and succeeding in accomplishing exactly zero of my intended plans - mowing the yard being the least of those.

None of it really mattered right at the moment, though, because the splintered deck belt on my mower was telling me I was a long way from finished in terms of time, even though I was 90% of the way there in terms of distance.  The belt is really fairly easy to change.   Snake it around a few drive pulleys, stretch it through the spring-tensioned idler to keep it tight, and shazam:  Short grass.

But that’s if you already have the deck removed from the mower, and a spare deck belt on your person, and I found myself coming up short on both counts.  With an hour to spare until they closed, I knew I could cover the 15 miles to the closest dealer with no problem.  After exchanging a few pleasantries with the lady at the counter while the parts guy pulled the requested belt from among the catacombs, I was on my way in five minutes, maybe less.  Removing the deck from my particular mower can be a finger-shredding affair, but due to my propensity toward mowing over rocks and jutting tree roots, I had it down to a science:  Drive the front wheels up on the two concrete blocks I had salvaged for the very purpose, pull two pins, disconnect the drive shaft, and slide the deck out.  That last part gets tougher as I get older, because the deck is grand-piano heavy, but it’s on wheels, so even in gravel, I make it work through sheer force of will, and a strong desire to be done mowing.

Once it was off, it was a quick matter of sweeping away some debris, and the belt would slip in place, the deck would slide back in the way it came out, and the grass would soon all be one even length.  More accurately, it would, if I had been given the correct belt.

Mower belts come packaged in a cardboard sleeve, which has the brand, length, model number - anything an information-hungry new belt-owner might want to know - clearly written across the front.  In this case, it was labeled, as it should be, with the exact number I had asked for.  And that was the reason I labored for half an hour trying to make a belt that was two inches too short fit my mower.

Finally, when my heart rate began to slow dangerously from the loss of blood out of my knuckles, I began to re-think my situation.  A stroke of genius was responsible for my examination of the belt itself, because printed clearly along the length was the exact number, as it shouldn’t be, of the belt I didn’t ask for.  It was the age-old case of wrong belt/right cardboard information card, and I should've seen it coming.

With the chirping frogs and growing shadows signaling the approach of darkness, I had run out of options at the same moment I had run out of time.  So I slid the wrong belt back into the right sleeve, and left the mower sitting where it was.

After a much-needed shower blasted away stray grass clippings and recent frustrations, I was in my house with my wife and daughter, and, in an uncommon turn of events, both sons.  We laughed and talked and laughed some more, enjoying that rare kind of evening I wished would never end.  That kind where everyone is home, nobody has any real plans, and the dancing, sparkling eyes of my temporarily care-free family brings a sense of happiness and calm that I would give anything to replicate on-demand.

But I never can.  None of us can.  Those times can’t be captured.  And I think that’s the reason why, as much joy as they bring in the moment, for me they’re always tinged with just a bit of sadness around the edges.  Sadness, because life is fleeting.  Children grow up.  We grow older.  And in this life, struggle is more common than relief.  But C.S. Lewis notes that it’s that very thing - that contrast between pain and joy - which allows us to live and appreciate those moments of joy to the fullest.

He’s right.  And even though I so often feel like I want to stop time, I know that even if I could, I wouldn’t.  I wouldn’t rob my children of their own choices, their own adventures.  I wouldn’t let the green fields and flowers of the spring, beautiful as they are, rob winter of it’s newly-fallen snow and crisp, brilliant mornings.

The mower is fixed now.  I returned the mislabeled belt for the correct one a couple of days later.  I’ve mowed the yard a half-dozen times with it since then.  Seems to be running well enough.  And amazingly, I can’t even tell where I left off that day - that time I wasn’t able to finish mowing the yard.

That time when every last detail and circumstance conspired against me.  Me, and my constant habit of getting tied up with things that simply don’t matter.

And missing the ever-vanishing things that do.

Doug LittlejohnComment