Face-off With May

Red may be the color of danger and sacrifice, but green is the color of aggression. Green wants to live. It is our sanctuary, our breath, and we will all be buried under it some day.

I hate spring. That’s an unpopular position and I don’t really know anyone who shares it with me.

April is beautiful enough. The greening grass, the trees with their first blush of red are lovely if you didn’t know what they were all up to. But eventually you understand that each bud is a little fist-faced birth pushing toward life. Everything’s sap is rising but mine. And just maintaining the view, keeping the long driveway passable, battling the invasive exotics and ousting poison ivy from the most traveled pathways, is overwhelming to me in scope. There is a new crop of borer bees in the soffit every spring and I must deal with them or they will be thumping me in the head and making pumice out of the porch ceiling until it one day falls on my head.

Weeds in the garden and a winter’s worth of windfall sticks and limbs have to be pulled or picked and heaved away. There is the issue of nursing along a 20-year-old much abused lawn tractor and encouraging it to take on another season of rampant growth and radically uneven terrain. If it can, I can, I think to myself.

Bless its heart, it started right off this year. The slogan ‘nothing runs like a Deere’ is the only advertising hyperbole that I’ve ever found true. I did rather impress myself with a starting technique that requires a great deal of positive energy and at least five of my two hands. There is a short somewhere in the wires behind the ignition switch so sometimes you turn the key and nothing happens. In that event you have to open the hood and gently move the wires with your left hand while turning the key with the right. While the motor is trying to turn over, you have to also move the choke forward all the way then back down, let it rest 5 seconds then turn the key and move the choke forward again until the engine catches and then quickly pull it back down to running position. Oh, and for the first start in the spring, to give yourself the best odds of success, you have to spray carburetor dryer into the top at exactly the same time as you turn the key, jiggle the wires, move the choke. It sounds impossible and it almost is, so I feel gloriously competent, and grateful, when it works. This year it worked.

I cranked up the compressor and put air in the tires, blew off the mower deck, then rode like an Indian princess being carried aloft by her servants in procession to her wedding. First stop was the front porch to do the spring tune-up. I’m an American. When we’re up against great odds, we love our machines.

I’m a nature loving, tree hugging American. I love the birds, raccoons, ground hogs, foxes, bunnies, possums and chipmunks that share this hill with me. I love the view from the house. And the green inferno that wants to rise like a tidal wave to block my view of the horizon must be subdued. It was reluctantly that I made friends with the tractor and things like brush killer and rodent poison. But I can't allow rodents, snakes or bugs in the house. I've tried it. It doesn't work. And I want to see out.

Since the 70’s I’ve made a lot of compromises. Every truce is uneasy. The assaults of nature on all my boundaries are blessed. And I, armed only with an old tractor and some hand tools, face-off with May, with about as much chance as Don Quixote had against the windmill giants; my expectations about as realistic. Fussy May with its pastels, its pollen ridden air and its unbridled passion-riddled growth is the giantess. I’m just one sneezing little woman, with an old lawn tractor, a pair of nippers, and an electric weed whacker. I can’t hope to win. I know which side will truly draw the blood. Deep down, I must have been born for war.