Song of the mower
Battling the turf out there in the mind-free world
We bought a new lawn mower. We don’t have a lawn really, but we have grass and plenty of it, two hours’ worth if we’re talking push mower, and we are. I thought about buying a ride-on mower but, and this is the truth, I like the walk.
I do. I like shovelling snow, too. Go figure! I enjoy physical work.
Whatever gets me out of my head, because inside this head sometimes… oi… is a dark circus, a cheap hotel. It’s Dickensian London in there, Harrison Ford’s dystopian future world of “Blade Runner.” Smoke and fog everywhere. Soot raining from the skies. No trees. Seven-storey LCD screens advertising noodles. Fingerless gloves, hobnail boots and a change of clothes every six months. So, please, pass the rake, the shovel, the sack of pelletized lime and set me free.
Battling the turf out there in the mind-free world. The thatch, the crabgrass, broadleaf plantain, the moss… the dandelions with their grappling hook roots, chickweed, nightshade and eye of newt. The mud track we gouged out of the grass in all the recent rain, trying to get around cars and cats in the gravel driveway.
Rolling out topographic maps on the lemonade table, strategizing sieges on a back yard… that really… you know… looks pretty good from two houses down, or from a passing satellite. Up close though, for all my blind, though best efforts, our “lawn” looks like Darth Vader took up quilting. But I love it out here.
And sorry about the soot reference. I grew up in the bustling coal town days in Glace Bay and soot really did rain from the skies. It fell on our “lawns” then too, our little 20’ X 30’ plots of hope, novelties really, reflecting in our newly installed thermo-paned, argon filled picture windows.
The history of the lawn in our neighbourhood began circa 1967 three company houses down the street, with one retired couple (nice people, forward thinkers) who had a paved driveway and a colour (albeit one-channel) TV, a trimmed lawn, a picture window, a front step to sit out on of a summer evening. It all looked so… orderly. Under control. Bought and paid for. Wouldn’t it, we thought, be nice if the rest of us could project to the world such an image of symmetry and decorum? As though having 13 kids in three small bedrooms, a coal barn and a come-winter come-summer clothesline wouldn’t knock a tick off of us?
Soon, little mountains of top soil began to appear here, there, everywhere. Lawns popping up all over the place. Lawnmower symphonies ringing out across the land. Garden stores taking root, supplying all we needed: seed, fertilizer, gloves, garden gnomes, weeders, watering cans… . Mowing the grass, 50 years later. I destroyed our last machine, I guess, through lack of proper, meticulous maintenance. It didn’t matter if the engine was Briggs and Stratton, Honda, or Kohler; nothing can withstand the force of my patient neglect.
I spent 40 hours on You Tube comparing mowers before going shopping. Consumer reports. Endless reviews.
Finally, I went with an orange mower from Eric’s Engine Shop. It’s beautiful. And I vow it will look and run as clean at the end of this summer as it does now on its inaugural cut.
Happy trails.