Mowing the lawn on a late summer's day

I begin the first row
cutting a clean, even swath toward a cloud of wasps
hovering over the sweet pulp of fallen plums
forgotten and gleaming, hidden and waiting
like pale jewels in the overgrown grass.

Back and forth I walk- the almost noonday silence
broken only by the whirr and turn of silver blades
and the rhythmic give and take of the springs of a trampoline
as my neighbor's child, Alice, jumps into the air,
hands searching, reaching,
as if to touch the blueness of the late August sky.
Though gravity is always and inevitably the victor,
her feet only briefly touch that which is solid and not space
before she leaps again, faithful and determined to fly
as the mid-day sun quietly blazes-
a round, white disc burning in the bluest of heavens.

The fresh scent of youth and that which is green fills the air
as I walk from fence to stone wall and back again.
The tiny white flowers that dot the expanse of lawn
like a constellation of stars sown and seeded by soaring swallows
silently disappear, fallen, like the tender blades of grass
amid which they had found purchase.
In their place, a verdant, velvet surface,
smooth and uninterrupted, slowly and methodically emerges.

Finished- the whirring blades are quiet now.
Order and symmetry restored, I pick a plum from its nest in the leaves
and watch as Alice, unflagging in her belief in weightlessness and flight,
flings herself once more against the late summer sky
and is for that moment suspended in the joyful and holy truthfulness
of being nine years old.