What does this word, "grace," mean? What does grace have to do with playing with shoe boxes and toy tractors in the lawn behind the house? The grass seemed so huge, and we thought, in our minds, for a minute that we might be helping. We sat in the grass, seeing it close up, cutting it with that hand-held clippers, mostly rust with some red flecks of paint still clinging to its handle, enough to feel both rough and smooth against our skin.

My mother was the one who cut the grass, those big lawns, with the self-propelled mower that took you along with it if you held tight to the handle while it bounced over the bumps of dirt and occasional ant-hills. It was a farmer's lawn. My mother, who worked too hard and wrapped her anger around her like a fuzzy shawl, because the men ran the farm, milked the cows, mowed the hay.

They mowed the hay in fields so big, that at night, during haying season, my father would sit at supper with a fine green veil of hay dust clinging to his face, just to the line where his cap covered his forehead. He and the hired hands took the big tractors, and the truck, and the hay wagons out to those fields, where you could look far out over that same green hue, lightened by the sun.

We played at haying. We cut the grass, enough to fill the shoe box we pulled behind the wobbly tractor, connected with a string. And then we were done, with nothing much to do with that pile of grass, unloaded from the shoe box onto a spot on the lawn, until the blade of the lawnmower would blow it away.

What is this thing we call grace? It is the thing we can't possibly do. It is the thing we work too hard to do. It is the thing that's too big. It's the thing we give up.