Lawnmower

“Man, 82, Takes Pride in Lawnmowing”

In “Man, 82, Takes Pride in Lawnmowing”, Joyce Daniel Harris writes about an elderly man who offers to tend to a woman’s lawn for her. Judging by the man’s old age, the woman believes he is inept, but she quickly changes her opinion of the man as she watches the man work with such great vigor and admires his skill. With the aid of first person point of view, Harris emphasizes the woman’s dubiousness of the man’s ability, but Harris then uses first person point of view to emphasize the woman’s awe towards the man’s skills. At first, the woman only notices the elderly man’s “shabby clothes, wrinkled skin, ill-fitted dentures and cracked voice of age,” and she thinks of him as an amateur because his lawn mower “didn’t seem to be a grasscatcher.” Judging the man by his appearance, the woman is skeptical of the man, but she reluctantly gives the man the task of mowing her lawn. Although the man seemed to old and weak for the job, the woman seems to be impressed when the elderly man “executed lovely straight lines, graceful turns and rounded corners,” and the woman was so amazed that she believed that the man’s “grace increased as the work advanced, and grew to become almost a dance.” Although the woman doubted the man at first, she was astonished by the man’s vitality that he possesses at such an old age. Rather than being skeptical of the man, she is now convinced of the man’s skill at mowing lawns. Harris utilized point of view to express the woman’s change of heart from being dubious of the man to admiring the man’s skill and vigor.