Hit the yard, next. New adventure though. Borrowed my father-in-law's tiller. An ancient thing. Probably south of twenty years old. Half broken. Half rusty. All pissed off and angry. A beast to crank and a bronco when it gets going. It was like trying to hold on to a bucking mule. It would bite into the ground and try to pull itself free from me.
There were huge lumpy mounds in the back yard. I tilled them smooth, mostly level with the rest of the ground. Took multiple passes and I had to stop frequently to hack up big roots. And sometimes the old blades would get wrapped with vines. Cumbersome at every turn. But it gave me a newfound respect for my ancestors. Men who must of have done the same thing, with even less favorable tools and in less favorable conditions. The tiller may be a rough brute, but at least it isn't a plow tied up to a braying, stank mule.
Come summer and then fall, the grass will grow again. The scars will heal. And hopefully nobody will ever know how I hid the past, how I ground down the mounds or how I covered the road. Nobody but me.
No comments:
Post a Comment