Lawnmower Man

I hate mowing lawns. Hate. HATE. Mowing the lawn was the one duty I was tasked with as a teenager, and it scarred me for life. The Midwest in the summertime is a special Hell, and for your sins, you'll mow when it's 95 degrees/98 percent humidity. My allergenic torments: the smell of cut grass was like tear gas, and the lawn clippings on my bare legs might as well have been poison oak. Eyes and nose running, shins itching, I'd bitch and curse my way through my appointed task every weekend. (At one point, I distinctly remember calling it "the cunting lawn". Such was the level of my vitriol. I don't think even British people use that particular c-word modification, and our friends across the pond, they know how to spin a cuss word.) I'm sure I wasn't the only kid who prayed for rain on Saturdays and Sundays, or better yet a drought, or perhaps some vast black seething clouds of hungry locusts. (MOWING. HATE.) Many teenagers, upon leaving The Nest, take it upon themselves to do everything that their parents told them they couldn't: drink, smoke, do drugs, buy a motorcycle, date a (INSERT ETHNO-RELIGIOUS GROUP HERE). My ambitions were slightly less picaresque. I swore that I'd never mow another lawn again. And for some twenty years, I upheld that oath. I lived in dorms, then apartments, and when we moved into our first bona fide house, a house with a huge backyard rife with lush, green, evil Grass, I promptly hired a gardening service. "Mow and blow, fellas." The chugging of the lawnmower (along with the smoky belching roar of the hated leafblower) was sweet music, because it was someone else doing the mowing. The noise was the perfect soundtrack to my sloth.

But something happened when we began the process of moving to the new Casa Avant, which also has a yard. I began pricing push mowers. And lawn rakes. I wanted to mow. No - I needed to mow.

It's not a real yard, by the standards of those who have actual backyards; maybe 30 square feet of grass, enough room for the dog and the kids to stretch their legs, perfectly sized for grownup lounging, ideal for landscaping-averse fellows like me. And maybe that was where it started. Surely it'd be stupid for me to actually pay someone to mow our little patch of grass. Yeah, it's California, where you just don't do your own groundskeeping - most of us lack the time, the know-how, and the Competitive Neighbor streak ("Frank's mowing his own yard? Frank don't surf!") to want to deal with the grass. But our modest yard...yeah, I could do that.

And so it was that I came home from the Depot with a $75 Scott five-bladed rotary push mower and a $10 rake. Human-powered! Possibly providing a bit of a workout! And since neither it nor the accompanying rake used gas or electricity, environmentally friendly! Suck it, OPEC! I rolled the mower out to the backyard - happy to report that no toes were amputated in the process - and began. The grass was dense; it had been a couple of weeks since it had been mowed, and the mower choked on the turf a few times. Back and forth I went, sweating in the hot sun. My legs began to itch. My nose hairs felt like pungee stakes. Twenty minutes later, I surveyed my work. Nice job, I thought. Looks good...except for that patch there. Back over it with the mower. Then...missed another spot. Back over it with the mower. Ok, looks go...shit, missed another spot. And another. And another. I began to suspect that the grass was sentient, that sections of it were laying down on purpose just to fuck with me. "There appears to be an event happening", I muttered. I smelled like a public gym locker stuffed with alfalfa and yet the thought of having someone else do this never crossed my mind.

Twenty minutes after that - yes, forty minutes to mow thirty feet of yard - I was satisfied. The lawn looked neat, kempt. It occurred to me that the need to mow was a symptom. And I understood, after all these years, the Why of Yard Work. The yard's our little piece of the earth. In the long view, the whole thing's pointless - all that sweating and sneezing and itching, and still the grass grows back, or it gets muscled aside by weeds, or a butterfly in China flaps its wings setting off a chain of events eventually resulting in a Santa Ana wind that sends a fire down the canyon, which then reaches the yard and torches the grass. Chaos and entropy, man. Nothing for it but to mow.