On Gonzo's Pond - Los YarderosBy Luis Gonzalez
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. Salaries frozen, overtime stretched, benefits trimmed, budgets pruned until even the rhythm of daily work strains against the ledger. The cuts were “necessary,” they said, as if necessity were measured in numbers alone. 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. Supply lines shortened, equipment recycled past its prime, schedules compressed—an entire economy of scarcity replayed in miniature.
The men move like ghosts in the bright morning, their bodies learning to fold around absence. Fatigue sets in not just at the muscles, but at the edges of attention, at the corners of their smiles. Where once there were small jokes shared over hedge rows, now only the hum of engines punctuates the air, a solitary rhythm that reminds you how much has been excised. Even the cadence of laughter seems to require time no longer allotted.
I watch the lone cutter pause for a sip of water, shoulders slumping under a load that used to be distributed. He wipes a sheen of sweat from his brow and glances over at the pond as if seeking counsel. There’s a subtle grief in that moment, a recognition that work—once a shared choreography—has become a solitary endurance test. The bonds formed in easy labor, the camaraderie of shared burden, fray quietly when the burden multiplies and the hands diminish.
The pond doesn’t care, of course. It holds the key 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—the invisible cuts, the stretched-thin hands, the slow, relentless pulse of necessity in an expensive world.
Yet there is resilience too, a stubborn grace that refuses to vanish. The man leans back into the hedge trimmer, the mower hums, and the pond continues to mirror the sky. Still, in the silence between machine and water, you sense the invisible ledger of human cost: each cut, each overtime hour, each stretched smile. The community that once hummed in unison now pulses in scattered beats, tethered by necessity rather than choice, and in those scattered rhythms, the true weight of “necessary” cuts becomes clear.
俳句
laughter lost to cost
One man becomes three at once,
ripples bear the weight
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