CLEANING UP
This afternoon Tom and Todd and Susie came by to take the branches downed in my yard during tropical storm Helene down to the edge of the road to be picked up by the trucks with a large arm that lift branches and put them into the back of other huge trucks that carry them away to the huge stacks of fallen trees at various points in the county. April is the last round of cleanups and we are ready.
This is another step in getting my house, where I and Kathe lived for 30 years, ready to sell.
The last thing they did was to pull my riding mower out of the weeks at the bottom of my lot where it had become a refuge for groundhogs who dug burrows underneath it.
Twenty years or so on the afternoon before my wife, Kathe, returned from a visit to her hometown, Winsen, in Germany I cut the grass with my riding mower. The ground was a little wet and slippery. Down by the fence along a pasture, as I was almost done, the lawnmower got stuck in the slippery dirt. I gave up for the day and turned it off. That night at about 11, I happened to look out the back window and saw flames fifteen feet high. My lawnmower, somehow, had caught on fire, I still have no idea how, maybe wet grass heated up and somehow ignited. I couldn’t find my fire extinguisher but my neighbor, Don, came over with his and put out the fire. In the meantime I had called the fire department which came with their big truck. They sat with me for a while to see if the fire would reignite, which it didn’t.
The tires had burned away, I didn’t know how to move it, so it stayed there, by the fence, gradually covered with weeds, a home for groundhogs until today when Todd and Tom hitched a chain to it and flipped it over and out of the weeds. Tom plans to use a device to cut it in half so that it can be loaded onto something and sold as scrap.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 