Mowing, please

Could we please come and watch you mow? my sister asked. Uh..I guess that means I've gotta commit right here and now to mowing tomorrow morning, uh, okay, uh, how 'bout 10:30? Great. 10:30 it is. So this morning I mowed for an audience.

My sister's new job is with a for-profit agency that provides one-on-one support to people with developmental disabilities in shifts of 5 to 10 hours. Saturday, she's usually with Tabitha and Tabitha loves to watch mowing. Tabitha also rarely graces us with spoken words but she'll speak mow whenever necessary, to unequivocally communicate her desire.

Is it the roar of the mower that tunes out the rest of the cacaphony? Is it the vibration in the body? Is it the methodical pattern that emerges in the grass? Is it the predictability, the understood, the known, regardless of being in a completely new place with completely previously unknown people - a rare sense of power of understanding the foreign? Okay, so the latter is a bit of a stretch, but it's interesting, no?

I had fun. We had fun. I acted out jokes for my sister and picked cherry tomatoes from the garden for them to snack on and I poured water over myself to cool down.

Good times.