Womit Fomit

For many families, mowing the grass is considered a man's work. In my family, lawnmowing was a martyred housewife's work. My father, Randy, was 'too lazy' to mow grass after coming home from a hot, stuffy carpenter's shop filled with whining saws, air compressors and blowing sawdust, wherein he built cabinets for a living. So, on summer weekdays while he was too busy earning a paycheck, or on weekends when he was 'laying on his ass' in his favorite recliner chair, my mother mowed the lawns.

I guess Randy figured that Beth enjoyed the activity, because for her anniversary present one year he bought her a brand-new, silver and red Honda lawnmower to replace the old, sputtering green one she battled with and constantly had to re-start after it would backfire. Even I thought the new one was cool, because it actually had a bag to catch all the clippings--that meant no more tracking barefoot through piles of cut grass that got stuck in between my toes.

To this day, Beth probably still complains about getting a lawnmower for her anniversary. Or maybe Randy said it was a birthday present, but gave it to her on their anniversary; according to her at least, he always got those dates mixed up because they got married on July seventeenth and her birthday is July twenty-third. As she also told me once (well, knowing her it was probably more than once), the one time Randy begrudgingly mowed the lawns he mowed her flower garden in the process, taking out what she said was a beautiful Rose of Sharon bush. After that, she always mowed.

It's not that she wasn't suited to the work, either. As a kid, my mother always seemed huge in stature to me, even though she only stood five foot three inches tall. She had broad shoulders and a heavy frame, upon which rested roughly two hundred pounds. She had thick, stout hands, and her narrow silver wedding band seemed a size too small for her finger. Even her glasses looked heavy. Whenever she did yard work, she would tie back her short, brown hair and put on a baseball-style cap with some kind of company logo on the front and a well-stained sweatband. This complemented her outfit of a weathered T-shirt and denim cutoff shorts that revealed her legs from her stout calves up to her even rounder thighs, marked by cellulite and spider veins. She kept a dirty pair of sneakers specifically for lawnmowing, which she sometimes accented with a pair of socks.

Dressed in her battle fatigues and wielding a new Honda lawnmower, Beth waged a continual war against the forces of nature in her backyard. For her, its clipping bag proved to be a useful addition. If she could collect the grass, she could use it to fill in holes. Beth hated holes in her yard. Two years after we'd gotten rid of them (it wasn't my idea), she still grumbled about finding holes our three pet ducks had eaten in the yard. However, small ducks eat small holes. The lawnmower produced a large amount of grass. Even if you found the holes and crammed them with grass, you still ended up with a prodigious amount left over. Then Beth seized upon what she thought for sure was genius.

Our covered patio was bordered by house on two sides, dirt on the other two. Runoff from heavy rains had eroded a shallow depression the length of the dirt-bordered sides, and often after a storm water pooled into a miniature moat. I just accepted that as part of nature, and learned to jump over the moat to get on and off the patio. On the other hand, our two Shetland collies, Ginger and Fluffy, apparently didn't always clear the moat and occasionally tracked mud onto the patio. Maybe my two brothers hadn't learned to clear it, either, but for whatever reason Beth decided to mount an assault against the erosion taking place around her patio. She needed something to fill the depression, and her new lawnmower could provide more than enough grass to do just that.

One sunny Saturday afternoon, my two brothers, our two dogs and I were playing outside. We never had any sort of organized games; if my brothers happened to be out while I was, I tried to avoid them while they stayed on the patio pushing around plastic lawnmowers, riding faded toddler-sized toy cars and arranging buckets that were originally summer-themed Happy Meal containers. This particular afternoon, like many, we had been called out to gather all of our toys from the yard so Beth could mow grass. I knew to mind her warnings because she had been known to mow over and pop inflatable rubber balls more than once. So after picking up a couple of plastic shovels and kicking our latest ball onto the patio, I spent probably an hour or so there petting Ginger and Fluffy while the Honda roared over the yard in rectangular patterns.

Once she was done, instead of hauling the heavy tan canvas mower bag to the back fence, Beth dragged it toward the patio. "I'm gonna put this grass around the patio, and I want you and Jean-Paul and Roger to stamp it down for me so it'll fill in this ditch."

I knew from reading her Back to Basics book that you can make compost to enrich garden soil, so I understood the basic idea as she explained. Eventually, as her theory went, the rain would decompose the grass and it would become part of the soil, thus eliminating the moat. At least, in theory.

Jean-Paul and Roger set about their task with typical three- and four-year-old eagerness, stomping and jumping up and down. Personally, I hated the smell of freshly cut grass and wondered what this stuff would smell like as it turned into compost, but I helped stomp anyway. Roger jumped up and down, kicking up clumps of grass.

"Hey, Roger's stirring it up, not stamping it down."

"Let him do, he's doing just fine."

He and Jean-Paul then produced their little red plastic garden shovels and began whapping at the tops of the grass mounds with the backs of them. This seemed even more fun than jumping on it, so they hunched down and drummed on the piles intently. I walked carefully back and forth, trying not to flick grass anywhere and trying to cover as much surface area as possible.

Just then, Ginger's pointed ears pricked forward and she sprang up from her spot in the shade. I will ultimately never know what piqued her instincts. It could have been anything; another dog, a pedestrian on the sidewalk in the front yard, a car, who knows. Whatever it was, Ginger rushed up to the front gate, which was right by the patio, barked energetically, then ran around to the other side of the house to bark some more. Being the self-appointed guardian of both yards, she had worn a trail around the back of the house from which she never deviated regardless of whether she was running to bark at an intruder or simply trotting at a normal pace. This path happened to make a tight turn around the corner of the patio--right through the grass piles.

Grass flew everywhere as her swift collie feet plowed through it. We heard her bark from the other side of the house, then make a return pass. Beth, my two brothers and I simply stared. I know she was thinking the exact same thing I was: every time Ginger goes to defend her territory, she's destined to barrel straight through our compost-in- progress. So much for tamping it down and letting it rot.

I tried to fight back a giggle. Beth smirked. Roger thought what Ginger had just done was cool. He took his red plastic shovel and began flipping big clumps of grass into the air. "Womit fomit," he rhymed.

"Womit fomit?" I repeated. At that point in our lives, I was convinced my brothers spoke their own language that nobody else could understand, myself included.

"Don't say that," Beth reproached. "It sounds like 'vomit'."

Jean-Paul was oblivious. "Womit fomit," he copied, flicking up grass with his own shovel. "Womit fomit, womit fomit," they chorused happily, getting grass everywhere.

I giggled again. This was the most original thing I'd heard all day. "Womit fomit," I joined in, jumping in the grass.

On any other day, Beth probably would have screamed at us, dragged us out of the mess we'd made and slapped us each in turn. Today, however, she knew she was beaten; she couldn't exactly spank Ginger for doing her job. She smirked again. "Womit fomit," she sighed.

She left the grass where she'd put it for a few more days, but after we started tracking it onto the patio and probably into the house, she finally admitted defeat, shoveled it up and dumped it behind the fence. It was another year or two, however, before she could get my two brothers and I to stop saying, "Womit fomit."

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