Confidence.

Grandfather smiled in his sleep. 

Feeling the smile and wondering why it was there, he awoke. He lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained. 

For he heard a sound which was far more important than birds or the rustle of new leaves. Once each year he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelion fires, ante, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last year’s July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower. A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months. 

God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Year’s Day No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of rachets and horns and yelling, there should be a great swelling symphony of lawn mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning! 

He snorted at his own lengthy discussion of the affair, went to the window and leaned out into the mellow sun shine, and sure enough, there was a boarder, a young newspaperman named Forrester, just finishing a row. 

“Morning, Mr. Spaulding!” 

“Give ’em hell, Bill!” cried Grandpa heartily, and soon downstairs eating Grandma’s breakfast, with the window open so the rattling buzz of the lawn mower lolled about his eating. “It gives you confidence,” Grandpa said. 

“That lawn mower. Listen to it!”

Ray Bradbury, from Dandelion Wine