The Well-Tempered Man

Mow the Lawn

It seems, on the surface, a simple task. The cutting of the grass is an established tradition in the Spring and Summertime of West-Michigan. My neighbor with the finely crafted, uniformly colored, perfectly flat, irrigated lawn does it with ease aboard his joystick-driven lounge-chair mower. He's retired, though, and he and his wife spend many hours a day in the yard, plucking, pruning, trimming and preening. Their lawn is perfect.

My other neighbor has a similar mower, similar irrigation, and a similarly cultivated green lawn, though he's a very busy man who works early hours at a tough job and returns home to exercise his artistic leanings by carving mighty oaks into bears, eagles, and lighthouses using various chainsaws.

Another neighbor is a farmer, breeds and farms using Belgian horses, and also has a day job delivering propane gas. His wife works at my son's school. They also have a beautiful lawn. It looks so easy...

So one would think, given a similar location, my lawn would green up like theirs.

Well, it doesn't.

So what am I doing wrong? Everything, it would seem.

Last year about this time, we were having a new roof installed. The roofer used a large lift to raise a platform to the roof, carrying shingles, men, rolls of nails... To this day, I can tell you exactly where he went with it. :-) The trenches it left are well-preserved in the hard-packed soil I have around the house. In the back yard, where the original builder buried the trees and stumps after clearing the woods for space to build, a sink-hole has formed, and the roofing contractor buried his lift to the axles back there. Wonderful. Maybe I'll build a pond. It's about a 2-foot deep hole, and getting deeper with time.

Even so, the front yard remains in pretty good shape. The yard is soft -- as it is each Spring, because it's been tunneled through all winter by ground moles. Each step you take out there, you sing in about an inch, leaving obvious footprints in the yard. It's that worked up.

Where grass will grow, it's infested with weeds. Near the woods, where little sunlight shines, moss is taking over the lawn. A different green, and certainly not healthy for the grass -- choking it out.

But I can still mow the weeds, right? Make it look nicer, anyway? I can roll the molehills down, dethatch the lawn, aerate the soil, and mow the weeds off so they don't appear too unsightly.

That was my intention this morning. I sent the children out to pick up stick in the little red wagon. A short task, but they made it long by deciding to also rake the leaves. Good kids! Got to love that ambition. Especially since Katie came down with a cold today, and wasn't feeling the greatest. They came back in a short time later -- "Dad, something's wrong with this wheel!" -- sure enough, we'd run over a crab-apple branch with a pricker intact, and it pierced the inner-tube of the wheel. I grabbed a tire patch kit, and in a half-hour was ready to start the tractor and go mow.

But the tractor wouldn't start. I got it to start last week. Once. After that it wouldn't turn over. So I replaced the battery. Still won't turn over. I tapped the solenoid with a hammer. Dad says that's a good thing to do. Still won't work. I charged the battery -- maybe I got a bad one. Nope, fully charged. Just won't turn over. I disassembled the engine housing, and checked the starter. The engine and the starter both spin freely. That isn't it. Maybe a bad solenoid? I don't know. Now it's beyond my level of expertise. I'll call a guy on Monday to get it in for service. I'm afraid they'll have to rebuild the engine, because I see oil leakage...

No problem. There's still a few hours left, and I can push-mow the entire yard. I can use the exercise. So I got out the push-mower, gassed it up, and set out to make my mark on the lawn one step at a time. This wasn't going to be pretty -- the roller can't be used without the tractor to pull it, so the mole-hills are all out there still, and the push mower will chop the tops off. Sure enough, I sink in deep, and the lawn gets a nasty buzz-cut wherever there was a mole hill. I got once around the yard, and stopped for a snake in the bushes, when it happened.

The push-mower died.

A noisy, clanky, metallic death. When I looked underneath, I saw why. The blade was totally worn out, and the ends of the blade were cut into a forked "V" shape. This blade was LONG gone. A stray roofing nail was embedded in the metal of the mower deck and had sliced the blade up, and the unbalanced blade had shaken the bolt loose, letting it vibrate under the mower deck.

So, I lost my temper a little. (That's a gross understatement, in case you didn't catch it.) By this time, the day was wearing on, and I needed to see that lawn mowed. The flowering grass plants on top of the mound on the east lawn mocked me as I pushed the dead mower into the garage. half-an-hour later, I'm back from the store with a blade -- and a spare -- to get the mower running again. Turned it over, mounted the blade -- back in business!!! NOT.

The tipping and mounting had flooded the mower engine with gas, and the engine refused to start. I pulled and I pulled, and it would start, run up to full speed and shut off immediately. Finally, I let it rest for an hour. That engine wasn't about to start and stay running. Finally, frustrated to no end, my wife asked what I was mad about. "Watch this! This thing won't start either!", and I pulled. Much to my chagrin, it ran! "Go! Get it done!", she cried, and I was off and running -- I cut my way across the front yard and turned to head back, victorious over the machine at last, I was thrilled to be hacking the tops off the mole-hills and dandelions, carving a swath across the wet lawn.

Wet?

Drip. Drip-drip. Drip. The rain began...

Bound to get the job finished, I plowed ahead, ignoring the icy raindrops running down my face. I kept pushing, pushing, going, and going, and eventually, the shower stopped, and I had won:

The front yard was mowed.

I was exhausted, fingernails full of dirt and oil, clothes looking like I'd wiped sludge everywhere I could find a clean space. But I was done. My lawn was no longer the total embarrassment it had been at the start of the day. It remained absolutely ugly, but not quite so embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the riding mower sits dead as can be in the corner of the garage. A useless heap of greasy metal costing me time and money. I can't decide if I want it to come back from the shop all fixed up and ready to go for the year, or if I want it to be DOA, so I can order a new one.

There's no end to the frustrations the world is capable of dishing out. Is there?
Time to shower, get cleaned up, return to the world refreshed.

"Hey, Dan? Did you know this shower is leaking?"