Sitting out back, I watch the grounds crew circle Gonzo’s Pond the way I might watch ducks tracing their own quiet patterns across the water. It used to be a small ensemble—five men in all, three on foot clipping and shaping, two astride mowers, each movement feeding the rhythm of the whole. There was a balance to it, like a work song you could almost hear if you closed your eyes.
Today that rhythm is broken, or maybe rewritten. Two mowers hum as always, but instead of the trio of hedge cutters there’s only one. He’s strapped to a riding hedger, steering with one hand while the other battles the air with a leaf blower. A strange duet: the low growl of machinery and the frantic hiss of wind. It looks like improvisation, survival even, but it carries a cost you can feel from a distance.
Forty percent fewer hands on the job, replaced by louder tools and heavier burdens. The math is easy, but the truth behind it feels heavier. Where there were once many, now there are fewer, and the few are asked to stretch themselves thinner than the pond’s own reflection at dusk.
They say policies are written far away, in rooms where the sound of grass being cut or leaves being blown never intrudes. Yet here, in the small choreography of lawn care, I see their shadow. Not in speeches, not in reports, but in one man hunched over a machine, trying to be three men at once.
The pond doesn’t care, of course. It holds the sky just the same. The reeds whisper. The water striders go about their business untouched. But on the banks, in the trimmed edges and the hurried work, I catch a glimpse of the new arithmetic: cost more, do more. And in that echo, I feel how the quiet of Gonzo’s Pond holds not only nature, but the weight of the world beyond it.
LG.
