Mowing lawn stirs up memories

Every time I mow the lawn, I think of three people.
I think of my old friend Al Conkling every time.
Al mowed a lot of lawns when we were kids, and he was much more efficient about it than I was.
While I was pushing our old reel-type mower (no fancy gasoline motor for the Ronalds), Al would get two yards done in the time I was working on one.
It was my father who said one day, when I was complaining about the effort involved, that I should watch how Al worked. I did, and I learned a thing or two.
There was no wasted motion when Al Conkling mowed a lawn; he had it down to a science. Following Al’s direction, I changed the way I mowed and reduced my time pushing that old lawnmower.
Though we lost Al several years ago to cancer, I still use his method when I mow today.
And when I mow, I also think of my old neighbor, Gary Gibson.
Gary was a retired Air Force officer and just about as great a neighbor as you could wish for.
As in any next-door-neighbor situation, it has never been precisely clear where the property line is.
Are those flowering crab trees on the line? Is the Gibsons’ shed the marker or does part of it actually sit on our lot? And what about the little grassy area in the city right-of-way between their driveway and ours?
Without talking much about it, Gary and I hit upon a simple solution, one I’d recommend to anyone who wants to maintain neighborly relations.
Our answer was that there were areas we both mowed, depending upon who got there first. The important thing was that the property looked good, not who had title to the soil beneath the grass.
Like Al, Gary’s gone now. Losing friends is part of the price we pay for growing older. (I’m not sure if Gary and Al ever knew one another, though Gary’s sister Gaye was a classmate of Al’s. My guess is that they would have gotten along just fine.)
The third person I think of is someone that I had forgotten about for decades and who only drifted back into my memory like part of a distant dream relatively recently.
His name was Junior McDaniel. His brother, Lee McDaniel, died earlier this month.
Junior was what we would today call developmentally disabled. Back then, he was “slow.” Best guess is that there was an oxygen deficiency during childbirth, but that’s just a guess.
I’m not sure what brought Junior back into my memory, but when he arrived it was vivid.
Maybe it’s because he was “slow” that I remember him as one of the kindest, gentlest people I ever knew. When I was 5 or 6 or 7 years old, my parents often had Junior do odd jobs around the house.
He put up the storm windows in the fall and took them down in the spring.
And he mowed our lawn, probably pushing the same mower I would push 10 years later.
Lee later told me Junior had moved to Florida, had a productive work life, and had married. That was great to hear.
But to me, he’ll always be this gentle, simple soul who was kind to a kid.[[In-content Ad]]