friday Firesmith – Let sleeping kids lie

Back in the late 1900s, the house across the street from me sat vacant and unsold for years. It was empty when I arrived, and for a brief couple of months a family moved in and then they were gone. I never met them. Here in South Georgia, you mow once a week if you don’t want the grass to become sentient and hostile. The month of July means the grass grows so fast you can watch it seethe out of the ground. The realtor that was trying to sell the empty house had someone mow the grass once a week, and for reasons I cannot explain, the guy mowed it at ten at night. He had this huge ass mower and mounted a light on the front of it that looked like the rising sun. The next morning, it looked like zombies with blades on their feet had passed through. The mowing was rushed and even using the spotlight from a German Air Raid Defense Unit bolted to the mower, it looked like the guy was half blind, half drunk, or flat didn’t care. The neighbor who lived in the house behind mine wasn’t a big fan of the noise, the light, or the fact shoddy mowing made that house look like crack addicts lived in it. He came over one afternoon and asked me if there was anything legal we could do.Legal? Gosh, legal never really occurred to me, actually. But his wife went to speak to the realty company and told them the kids had to be in bed by nine, and having someone that sounded like a crop duster operating past ten at night was not something she, or anyone else, cared to endure. Two days later, the guy shows up at 10:30, and he leaves the music playing in his truck as he mows. Loud music. A friend of mine worked at a machine shop, and one of their more frequent work requests was shorting signposts manufactured out of steel pipe. They had quite the collection of round pieces of pipe that were two or three inches in diameter and four or five inches long. The next time Monster Mower showed up, at 10:30, my neighbor and I got a six pack and sat on his porch and listened to the sound of metal against metal as the guy hit one after another. Finally, he stopped, got off the mower and rode with the blades off, looking for the offending pieces. He found most of them and threw them into the back of his truck, and mowed on. We walked over and took them out of the back of the truck and tossed them into the back yard. He started hitting them again, hunted them down again, then as he was putting them into the truck, realized what had happened. He looked around and saw two men raising their beers to him. He loaded up and left, for good. The next day one of the local cops arrived to issue us a strongly worded scolding. He came back after hours to drink with us. But at nine o’clock, we called it a night. The kids were getting ready for bed.

Take Care,Mike