I mowed the yard today. No, that doesn’t make me special – hundreds of thousands of middle-aged men in the Midwest mowed their yard today. It was about the seventh time I mowed the yard this year. Again, this hardly differentiates me from other men my age. What makes this particular mundane chore different is that up until about four years ago, there wasn’t a yard to mow at my house. When I bought my house in a neighborhood full of free thinkers just outside a college town seven years ago, you could barely see the house from the street despite the fact that it was no farther back than a normal house in a suburb. A previous owner of the house, who had purchased the house in 1958, decided that thirty-nine years of lawn care was enough and just let it go. The front yard become the province of honeysuckle, scrubby trees, and poison ivy. Slowly but surely, Ms. Boss and I beat back the jungle until a lawnmower became a necessity. Four years ago, I mowed once. The next year, I probably tripled that number. Last year I made it seven times total. This year I find myself mowing with the frequency of your average middle-aged midwestern male for the first time.
As teenager, I was hired by the company my father worked for to mow their lawn. Thirty minutes travel there, four hours riding, two hours pushing, one hour string trimming, and the ride home made for a long day. I made decent money for a decent day’s work… until I got fired. It seems that the Gravely mower I used needed oil to run properly. I was running it downhill when it started to strain then… POW!!! When a mechanic at he company pronounced it well and truly dead, my father fired me but said I had to finish the job with a push mower first. It remains the one and only time I ever got fired. The epilogue to this story is that I got rehired four weeks later… and religiously checked the oil in the lawnmower afterwards.
I got my license suspended when I was seventeen (you’ll need to wait for another post for that story) and found myself unable to drive the thirty minutes needed to get to my mowing job. Football practice consumed the weekdays that time of year so riding with my dad was a no go. He insisted I find a way to get there so I enlisted the services of my best friend from high school. For half of my pay for the day he drove me up and did the push mowing and trimming while I rode on the mower. Of course it rained cats and dogs the only day we could do it. I can still remember passing by him while he was push mowing the front of the building. With water pouring off the end of his nose, he flashed me a smile as I drove by. He was a true friend doing me a solid favor and I’ll never forget it.
Ms. Boss tried to do me a solid favor in the early years of our marriage by mowing our yard when I worked a bunch of overtime. It was her first time. It was also her last time. Instead of recognizing the achievement and thanking her, I instead told her it would never pass my father’s inspection. She vowed she would never do it again and has been true to her word. I was a complete asshole and definitely deserved that.
The Bosses lived on a piece of property in a Western state for about seven years when our children were young. Quite poor at the time, we could only afford a push mower for our 15-acre property when the sixty-five year old tractor we owned wasn’t up to the task. During the dry months, it really didn’t matter… except one place. As Erma Bombeck once wrote, grass really does grow greener over the septic tank. What she doesn’t say is that it also grows taller. I was tackling that particular chore one day – mowing the dry edges then pushing furtively into the green tangle – when on one particular pass, I pulled the mower out to find the lawnmower ablaze. Dried grass had gathered near the exhaust and caught on fire. I yelled at the kids to bring me the garden hose and made quick work of the problem and commenced to mowing again. It made an impression on the kids though. When one of the Bosslets – in second grade at the time – brought their journal home from school the next week, there was a full account at what had transpired. It was possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read. I wish I still had it around.
The house I grew up in was the first house in the subdivision off a state highway. A huge, deep ditch lie between our driveway and the state highway about a hundred feet long. Standing at the top and pulling it up and down the side was not option since it was deep making mowing across the only option. The sides were so steep you pretty much had to stand at the bottom of the ditch and angle the mower up to get it to mow straight across. It was a pain in the ass that my step-brothers and I endured for years. As soon as the last brother left the house, my father filled in the ditch so he didn’t have to put up with it.
Growing up, we had a Snapper riding mower. It hung around for years until after I left the house for good. There’s a picture of me riding on my father’s lap as he mowed the yard. I have very fond memories of those times.