The thought hit me as I was standing in the middle of my front yard.
It was a Shakespearean quote from an old college literature class, something my business friends called an “education in trivia.”
It was from MacBeth, something about standing in the middle of a river of blood, and being at that point in your life where going forward wasn’t any easier than turning back.
In my case, there wasn’t any blood, but there was a half-mowed front yard rendered yellow and hay-like from a recent hot spell.
Clearly, the lack of rain had made this exercise meaningless, and indeed, mowing ahead or re-mowing the steps already traveled would yield little difference.
At that moment I couldn’t even tell for sure where the dividing line stood.
And yet I was glad to spend forty-five minutes in the hot sun for little visible reward.
In fact, it was the best of the options in front of me.
You see, it was the Saturday evening before Father’s Day, a holiday where my friends and fellow fathers gather into foursomes to hit little white balls into the woods.
My wife had just completed a day of pruning and trimming the yard in anticipation of a small summer picnic set for the following weekend.
“Boy the yard looks pretty good and once it’s mowed, it’ll be perfect.”
‘The yard doesn’t need to be mowed, dear,” I thought. “It needs many hours of a soft, slow summer rain.”
But here, gentlemen, is the moment when you need to have a clear vision of how the adversary thinks.
My wife, a schoolteacher by both trade and demeanor, a woman whose view of the world always includes a place for everything, has a mind that can not comprehend a willingness to leave a job half-done.
I could have said no, loaded my clubs into the Jeep and headed off to my holiday.
But that unfinished yard would continue to creep into my wife’s thoughts, fester like an illness until it would begin to weigh on her soul. It would mock her from the window and call to her from the breeze until at last she could take it no longer.
While I would be out having fun on Father’s Day my wife would toil in the hot sun in full view of the neighbors, nudging their growing suspicions that in real life I’m (da-tah) Uncaring Slacker Guy.
So yes, I mowed a yard that didn’t need it; a yard that I knew didn’t need it before I even started.
And yes, I went over patches time and again because the past looked identical to the future.
But compare that to the cold stares and head shakes from the neighbors.
Weigh that against my wife’s ability to say in a single glance, “You know what? I had real promise and I married YOU??”
With all due respect to Mr. Shakespeare, I’d say I took the path less bloody.
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