I've said this before, my intimacy with my backyard and my whole yard in general comes from cutting the grass, but it's a disconnected intimacy. While I pushing the mower back and forth or up and down the yard, depending upon orientation, music plays in my ears. I kick clumps of grass that are too much for the bag and I know it's time to empty again. It's really only on these segues of emptying the bag that I look up and see what I've created with my yard. Parallel lines on one side. Neatly arranged and beautifully shorn.
As I scan across the yard, I'm very aware of what's still to come, an unruly bristling of overgrown blades of grass, desperately in need of a hair cuts. I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm and the slickness of my forehead combines with the coarseness of grass clippings that have inserted themselves into my arm hair. Even through whatever music is pumping in my ears, I enjoy this grittiness and I observe it other place on my body as well. Right along the seam of my sock or just above the elastic waistband of my gym shorts or even in the creases of my exposed neck. I know I'll carry this interaction with me beyond the actual grass cutting.
Not to overdo metaphors, but it's not unlike the residual effects of making love. You can still smell that other person on you, intricately woven into your own scents and sensations from the way you sweat, once moist, blended and dried or the lingering smell of a lover's private parts. It's never a constant impression, but when the winds shift or you reposition your body the essence of the encounter catches back up with you.
When you itch your face the deep aroma of grass clippings or sex can fill your nose or as you strip to shower you find stray clippings or strand of hair that is not your own. It ties you to the past and many times the promise of future encounters. I know it's crass to compare working in the yard to sex, but the sensations of touch and smell after both encounters were inescapable for me. It's that sharing of fluids and fibers, that blending that occurs when we dry out and move onto the next activity whether it's the morning after or standing at the grill in the backyard waiting to flip the burgers or turn the chicken. We dry out, we mix together, we share a little bit, and the evidence of our intimacy is rarely something visual. It's usually a little more subtle than that.
I don't think your metaphor is at all overdone. There's something so distinctive and intense in both experiences. And I think both have the powerful ability to evoke emotions or memories just as intense. Who doesn't have a memory that surfaces, say, from smelling freshly mown grass?
ReplyDeleteIt's weird, that such a public place should be so intimate. Maybe that's why we tend to like putting up fences. There's something private about the backyard happenings of a family. Its where we first plant familial values and watch them grow.
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