#freewendell

In a startling turn of events, a few weeks ago Wendell suggested maybe we should buy our own mowing tractor. He had just mowed our lawn beautifully and, as usual, without being asked. The whole world smelled a little like a mug of chamomile tea. It was easy to ignore that the days were growing shorter, the potatoes were starting to outnumber the zucchinis, and our week at the Tiller Project was coming to an end.

A week! A whole week. Our family visited, and friends came to float the river. We shopped at Wendell’s farm stand daily, explored a nearby crystal clear lake, scraped some wallpaper and installed some tiles and debated, again, the placement of an imaginary barn. Would the imaginary barn be clapboard or board and batten? This seemed important.

What didn’t seem important was the length of the grass.

Lawn maintenance is important to the neighbors, though. We ran into Bonnie at a consignment shop and she mentioned that perhaps someone should invest in a weed whacker to deal with the shag around the maple tree and the well cover. “I bet you don’t even see it!” she safely wagered. And Wendell came right over on his riding mower after we arrived, hardly a wave from under the brim until he’d given the whole place a buzz. He seemed almost sheepish that he hadn’t mowed before we got there. (We hadn’t told him when we were arriving.) When Ned offered to take over the mowing duties with his old-fashioned, dull-bladed rotary cutter, Wendell cut the conversation off right at the root: get a real mower, then we can talk.

At the end of the week, Ned dutifully swung his (also dull) single-bade manual grass whip around the well cap: we don’t care about grass so much, but we do care about neighbors. The canoes were tucked into the shed and the patio chairs stashed inside. It was Labor Day, and harder to imagine away September. We loaded up the truck and the car with laundry, the cooler, the laptop largely ignored for a week, the tools we’d need in the city weeks ahead. And then, a couple miles down the road, just past the bridge construction, the brake light went on in the car, along with a number of indicators I’d not seen before. I am no more car person than lawn person, but I have an eye for icons, and these read “certain doom.” So I called Ned, and we turned our two-vehicle caravan around, and went back to the Project. And called Wendell.

The menfolk conferred, got the car up onto Wendell’s trailer, and chocked the tires so he could take a look underneath. I sat in the truck doing who knows what useless thing while Wendell figured out where some brake electronics had come disconnected, and how to fix it with whatever he had on hand. “You should be fine,” said Wendell. The dashboard having returned to its regular program of indicating alarm when I drift over a line, and me having returned to my regular program of ignoring the dashboard, we buckled into the truck and the car and headed home.

The season now underway is a cornucopia of school events, work travel, family celebrations. We’re lucky to have a full life, of course. But absence makes the barn a little harder to imagine. And poor Wendell: the independence he hopes to cultivate in us is surely harder to imagine, too.