The lazy monster – start!

I am beginning to think that I live in a house full of ghosts. They leave us alone, if we pretend not to know about them. Whenever, after a long mental persuading that something has to be done, we start a bit of activity, they start disrupting.

One ghost is certainly living in our tractor. He lives there so well that the tractor does not want to go. I would like to call him “Cable”.  Since our tractor functions rather as a grass-cutter and truck for woods than just a tractor, it must be a female ghost and would call her “Cabella”. Nobody explained to the grass in our garden that we are in it completely alone and we have to learn everything, really everything, and we need some time to do so. The grass does not seem to care and is growing and growing. The ghost “Cabella” did not tell us that we would need a cable and a car to start the tractor, since it did not move for a while. The ghost also failed to understand that it would help if he would stop his sabotage since I am not driving a car I would have to walk to the petrol station.

The ghost should have to know that it took us already a long time to find out that our tractor drinks petrol and not diesel. That petrol is “le gazole” in French. When we were trying to find out the word, we were throwing a buck to each other. Well, until we took courage to start the tractor, it looked like this.

Me, mother, I am telling my daughter Klarka (to avoid doing it myself, of course) “take a canister and go to the petrol station. We have to cut the grass. The tractor does not move.” ”It’s not starting, this lazy monster”, I vent myself. As if I would speak about a morose neighbour, waiting for a bus and holding everybody back.

Klarka does not dance to my tune. “Do I have to go now?”

Sure. I am firm. Even if I know that my behaviour is not very honest right now.

The next remark is coming. “I do not know how to say it”. The whole reasoning is imminent – she is rather good at that.

“I cannot go to the petrol station and just say in French something like – “j’ai besoin, je ne sais pas quoi…” –  meaning “I need this but I do not know how to say it” so that we can cut the grass”.

Finally, I gave up and asked a friend who lives nearby to bring as a canister with the petrol. He is kind, he did so, and so we could persuade a ghost of the tractor to be kind enough not to meddle in our grass cutting in the garden.

We are professionals now, especially Klarka. She knows how to persuade the ghost “Cabella” not to harm and let the tractor go.

There are many sketches, reminding about times when the first cars started to move. There was a person with a red flag in front of a car to let everybody know that the car is coming. It is so in our garden now, just the red flag is Terezka.

She is running in front of our grass-cuter, not to alert anyone, but to pick up the stones. So that the tractor ghost does not get angry and does not stop doing what he is supposed to do. A vision that I would have to let repair this technical miracle in a foreign country and explain anything about it, is frightening me more than Corona virus.

Once the ground is ready, Terezka jumps over to Klarka’s knees and they go around the garden on the tractor with a lot of joy. A smell of cut grass evokes a summer holidays, freedom, and happiness. I wish it would be so. It is actually so in those moments, at least for a while. Luckily so.

Cartigny, 24.4.2020