QUIET SATURDAY MORNING IN A PANDEMIC

 By Leo Reyes 
Special to El Rrun Rrun

I am looking out the living room window, staring at the tall grass on the front yard, wondering if it’s safe to go outside and mow the lawn.

Now that I’m hearing that a cough can surf air currents over long distances, I wonder if resistance is futile; the virus will catch up sooner or later with all of us.

Maybe I should just stay inside and pay someone $30 bucks to take that risk.

To my right, I look at the neighbor’s manicured yard. It always has a fresh crew cut, edges are sharp and their blood-red bougainvillea is somehow always in bloom: hissing sprinklers lullaby them to sleep.

My yard and its assorted bushes, on the other hand, go from brown to green to brown according to the seasons and the amount (or lack) of rain. I can’t keep up with Mr. Yard of the Month, not that I ever tried. I got other stuff to do. But instead of admiring his devotion to a well-kept yard, I figured my neighbor must get stressed out bumping into his spouse and grown kids all day that he has to come out twice a week and once on Saturday mornings to crank up the lawnmower and that infernal weed eater and sometimes a chainsaw, just to decompress.

This Saturday morning in my north Brownsville suburb, however, it’s very quiet, which is why I can look out the window, sip on my coffee, and ponder away eternal questions such as: why is Robert Frost concerned about the ownership of the woods or should I break my covid19-imposed isolation and open my hyperbaric chamber for an afternoon delight?

I should just pay someone to cut the grass and stop this Woody Allen angst. Call the Bargain Book guy and get it over with. Then I can lock myself in my room and write some silly nonsense that makes me smile for a while before going in the trash.

I do need some fresh air and exercise though. This death virus going around has shut down just about everything and anyone. Once I crank up the lawnmower, my body will limber up like a panther for the grueling thirty minutes pushing a helicopter upside down. Still, it’s a loud and intrusive affair and I’d hate to be the first one to wake everyone on an unusually quiet Saturday morning.

I’ll sip on some of this Costa Rican coffee and have a smoke and think about it. As I survey the landscape outside my living room window, I notice to my far right an old, brown lazy boy sunning itself outside the neighbor’s garage; it has a faded Cowboys sticker on the side.

Except for the lazy boy and the unusual hush of this Saturday morning, everything outside my window looks like any other weekend morning. Then the phone rang. It was my other neighbor.

“Did you hear?” he said.

I hadn’t heard anything. I’d been sipping on my morning coffee and having a smoke and wondering if I should disturb the peace and mow the overgrown yard; there were many pros and cons.

“No, I haven’t heard anything,” I said, repeating myself to myself.

“Your neighbor Oscar, he kicked the bucket,” he said.

I said nothing for a few moments, waiting for a punch line. My neighbor liked to joke around so I thought there was a joke coming. But there wasn’t.

“Dead as in dead dead?” I said. “He was up in a ladder a couple of days ago cutting mesquite branches.”

I tried to imagine my middle aged neighbor killed in a cartel shootout in Matamoros or asleep at the wheel in a head-on collision or bleeding to death from a knife fight in a bar; he did have an attitude. Maybe he ate that bad ground meat going around last week. Maybe he fell off the roof and broke his neck trying to reach some branches. I’d seen him up there a couple of times. Maybe...

“He died from the corona virus,” my neighbor said. “They took his body last night and they’re calling somebody to disinfect the house this morning.”

“Did he have a Lazy Boy?” I asked.

“Yeah,” my neighbor said. “An old brown one he used to sit and watch the Cowboys on Sunday afternoons.”