by Jo Ann Rangel

Created on: November 16, 2008   Last Updated: December 09, 2008

This is the tale of how one woman found her way back from a state of mental chaos and inner turmoil with the assistance of a nine dollar push mower.

She works a full time job for a company that any day now is apt to lay her off. The mortgage is a month overdue and the calls are starting up again from the bill collectors. She spent all last weekend curled up in a fetal position sleeping fourteen hour days on her sofa that faces the open window of her front yard with its growing jungle of six to eight inches of ryegrass and the growing stares of uneasiness from her neighbors who are outside daily trimming the quarter fourth of an inch off the tops of their perfectly manicured lawns.

In a state of grogginess she props herself up at her desk and checks her email. On Yahoo Groups she sees her daily email notices for "Cheapcycle." There is a family losing their home to foreclosure selling the contents of their garage and on their list is an old Craftsman push mower for ten dollars. She shuts off the computer and returns to her sofa. She doesn't have ten dollars to her name.

She dreams about having her purse with her then the building she is in starts to burn, she looks back in her purse and finds out her money was taken. She is a passenger in a car with no driver and as it careens in and out of traffic she jerks herself awake just as it was set to hit a retaining wall out of nowhere made of rock.

She had slept two more hours during this dream. She returns to her desk and turns on the computer again. The family trying to sell the contents of their garage revises the prices; the mower is now nine dollars. They say it works, it is ready to go. A sense of wanting she had not felt for many months overtook her sensibilities and she wrote to the family that if no one had taken the mower she could go pick it up Monday. She gets a reply that the mower is hers they will keep it for her.

When she gets to work Monday she asks a coworker for a ride and he lends her the nine dollars to buy the mower when they get to the address after work, which turned out to be twenty miles from the city. The husband, wife and their five kids of various ages, greet her at their driveway and show her the mower. She pays for the mower and the wife explains that the money will put gas in her car to get to work the next day and thanks her for taking the trouble to make it out to them. By the time her and the coworker get back to the city it is dusk, and after the coworker leaves the woman sits on her

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