Mowing the lawn….
Rosemary from my yard.
Just did it this morning. It’s a menial task, but someone’s got to do it. It takes around 45 minutes at my new house. It used to take about two hours for my acre in Cibolo, and that was with a riding mower. That was a god-awful job, with dust and rocks and weeds and little tree stumps sticking up here and there. I’ve noticed that the people who bought the place have given up on the empty half acre, opting for the “wildflower” look.
Is mowing the lawn a man’s job? It is and always has been in my family. So is taking out the garbage. Now laundry, that’s a woman’s job. My wife thinks that our clothes stay nicer and last longer if she launders them—no argument from me. I think I do more cooking than she does now, but that’s another blog entry. I have driven by homes and seen a woman mowing the lawn. I always wonder where the man is. I picture him inside in front of the TV with his feet up, drinking a beer, and I speculate about a sullen marriage. (Yes, I realize that in these times it is far more likely there is no man of the house.)
When my sons were teens living at home, I used to try to rope them into mowing the lawn, but I wasn’t very successful. I’ll bet that together they haven’t mowed ten lawns in their lives. They both used the same ploy. They’d get on the riding mower and run over some protruding rock or root or stump, making a horrible clank. The repairs invariably cost me more than hiring someone to do the lawn would have.
Do people mow the lawn the same way? I break it down into sections, and then I do laps from the outside in. The first three laps I do so the grass is shooting inward, toward the unmowed grass. Then I reverse it so the grass shoots outward. Of course, I do this in hopes of keeping grass off my driveway and porch and sidewalks, but it’s not that effective. It mostly just depends on which way the wind is blowing. My sections don’t follow any geometrical pattern, just the way the lawn is shaped. One of my sections might be a trapezoid and one a rhombus. (Okay, I think I just made those terms up.) My largest section takes 12 laps and my smallest takes 5 with a couple of extra zips.
What do people think about when they mow the lawn? I know I never thought about actually mowing the lawn until today. Sometimes I do songs and sometimes I just space out mindlessly—if I have one recurring thought, it’s how much longer is the damn job going to take?
There is one thing I do like about mowing the lawn—the mockingbirds. I guess they eat bugs and worms, because whenever I mow they hover around the yard and swoop down when I uncover a new swatch. I suspect every high school English teacher has a warm place in his/her heart for the mockingbird.
Karen has a special thing for weed-whacking. Not for doing it, but for having it done. For her, a mowed lawn without it is like peanut butter and bread without the jelly. And she wants peach preserves—none of that grape crap. Personally, I think a man’s lawn should reflect his character, and God knows I’m a little rough around the edges.
But there is something civilized about a freshly mowed lawn. (When I was young, that was my brother’s idea for the name of a rock band: The Freshly Mowed Lawn…nah, I don’t think so.) I guess it is Nature’s haircut. There’s something pristine and orderly and controlled about it, and it smells nice too. As I sit on my back porch looking at my freshly mowed lawn, it just seems to meld in to the rolling fairways, tee boxes, greens and sandtraps that lie beyond it. Now that’s real civilization. I’m a lucky man.
