“Rhyne! Rhyne!”
Of the conceivable pronunciations of my four-letter name, this is my favorite. My neighbor Tamara, more Appalachian than “Wagon Wheel” and sweeter than Western Carolina Ice Tea, waived me over from the edge of her above-ground pool. Having just finished my workday in the shop, I walked her direction across our shared greenbelt.
“I got your backyard tomorrow,” Tamara said, her blonde and grey hairs bleaching closer together in the sun. “I’ll get yours done right after mine.” No way, I told her. She’d already been too kind, mowing the yard last week while I was recovering from tarsal capsulitis, a foot ailment I hadn’t known existed until I acquired it after playing tennis with my wife, in flip flops. Not recommended. 3 weeks later, my gait has improved from hobble to cautious walk with dutiful adherence to an ankle brace.
I convinced her, eventually, that I was healthy enough to mow my own yard. “Okay Rhyne, but you say the word and me and Jenny (the name of her riding mower) will get it knocked out.” She returned to her water aerobics. I walked back to our house, offering a silent prayer of gratitude for a wonderful neighbor, then wondered how I’d actually mow my lawn. It was a cavern with a thin roof thanks to the colony of ever-populating voles. A capsulitis minefield. But I didn’t care. I had to mow my lawn.
Why? I wondered the next day as I pulled the ripcord and shaved down a small strip of Bermuda between my house and driveway. Why am I so compelled to do this monotonous activity that I’ve done hundreds of times? Front finished, I started on the back, still searching. Why do I care so much about trimming the grass of my rental home? With an injured foot? Rhyne, why?
The truth is in how I feel when it’s done: closer. Closer to what, it’s hard to be sure, but in a yard I’ve mowed dozens of times, it can always be mowed more artfully, intentionally. It’s a chance to refine how I live, as nauseatingly optimistic as that sounds. Capsulitis or not, how I mow the lawn is how I’ll approach the blank page or the chair in shop. All swings at eternity, all meaningful in and of themselves, all ripples in the same above-ground pool.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
