Cutting

On weekends, they cut bushes. My husband and our five-year-old son. Usually, I am in the kitchen slicing vegetables or skimming the paper. Out the window, which looks to the rear yard, I can see their outlines beneath the sycamore tree—my husband tall, our boy just to his waist. Baggy shorts on both. They sweat a lot and break now and then to slug down the instant lemonade I bring them in paper cups. The adult size gardening gloves look cartoonish on our son’s small hands, while the giant trimming shears he wields could be weapons in a faraway war where they make children fight. 

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I have admonished my husband to watch our youngest child, not to take his competence for granted. Anything could happen, like those terrible farm accidents you read about. Lost limbs, lost lives. He humors me, but I know where the difficulty lies. I see it in the synchronicity of their movements as they haul branches to the two green barrels that sit like sentries across the lawn. Mouths agape, the barrels wait to be filled with leaves and chunks of hacked-up bark that are green and moist where the cuts are fresh, some just beginning to bleed sap. The earthen smell is so overpowering it can make its way on a good breeze into the kitchen, putting me in mind to brew some tea.

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I strain the tea into a juice glass, knowing it will be too hot to pick up for some time; but I like to see the stained color of the water and the bits of escaped leaves swirling around in it. The steam hits my face and I look back out the window. They cut for a while longer, then lay down their tools and haul for a bit, dragging the bushy heads of the weightier branches along the ground beside them. As they near the barrels, our son drops his branch and runs to man the gaping mouths. When my husband lifts the branches vertically into the sky (all the air around us, everything we breathe, is really just sky, my smart son has told me), our boy reaches up to help feed the wood down into the belly of the bins. They have practiced this move. My husband has trained our son, who knows exactly when it is time to drop his load and run for the barrels. When they’ve emptied their load, they walk to a different area in the yard—my husband leading, our son trudging behind him like a small shadow—and begin cutting again. 

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Occasionally, my husband will point to something and speak. I assume, but cannot be sure, he is issuing a gentle order. But mostly they just cut, my husband deliberately, calculating the most efficient joints to snip, while our son is haphazard, hacking off offending twigs even if they are not essential to the larger purpose of pruning. As he picks up speed, so that his hacking is not only random but frenetic, I want to shout out the window, “Slow down, be careful—you could get hurt,” or to my husband, “Watch him, for God’s sake.” But I know that to watch him is beside the point. They are one person and it is not my place.