Mow, Mow, Mow 1,001: 33

I bought a Sears rotary blade mower 9 years ago.  Partly for nostalgia, partly for Green reasons.  I resolved to not pollute yard-ly (organic and edible) dandelions with gas fumes.  Nor fume the birds or vegetable garden (or me), and most surely not to fume the already-battered ozone layer. I've stuck to the rotary mower about half the time.   If I'm disabled, in a hurry, or facing a badly overgrown yard, I resort to a gas mower.

Since last evening was a truly fine spring specimen, I ventured into The Yard to see about Law and Order. 

This time of year, I am subject to Yard Frenzy.  There is dirt to be dug, stuff to be planted, thoughts to be thunk regarding The Garden.  Nothing is as wonderful as playing in The Garden. But I put garden aside for the moment; the grass looked particularly healthy, thick and long. I hauled out the rotary-blade mower, Betsy (I name all my favorite inanimate objects Betsy), and buckled down to an upper-body workout doing the May-November routine.

I love mowing. Mowing yards qualifies as a Mystic State. I get this partiality from DNA, specifically Mom.  She used to love mowing.  It was one of her escape methods from 6 people who shared her medium-sized house.  It was also part of her philosphy, dredging up dialogue with God undercover of engine noise.  Years later, Mom's decision to leave the farm and move into a town duplex came about when she realized that she--a diminutive 87-year-old--was spending the whole summer mowing the yard.  She said, "I'd mow as much as I could every day, and as soon as I got it all mowed  I'd have to start all over again."  Finally, she started out to mow one day and found that both old push-mowers had simultaneously died.  She said it was The Writing on the Wall:  her mowing days were over.

For us kids, mowing was recreational. Comparatively speaking. For childhood summers, we didn't go to camps or beaches.   That was for sissies.  Our summer season arrived when we pulled out the lawn mowers.   As able-bodied-and-available statuses changed out over my 18 years on the farm, I rotated lawn-mowing duty with 4 siblings.  It took several hours to mow the whole thing--a quarter acre--at once.  More often, we'd break it up into sections and take a day or two to spread the fun around.  We'd do the orchard ( a few fruit trees encouraging each other to survive and sometimes produce) as one section, the front and side yards as one section, and the no-man's land behind the flower garden as a section.  There were little hills and valleys throughout the mowing field. Aside from the occassional snake (Mom swore they were all copperheads and cottonmouths, because she hated snakes, but Dad said they were all just black snakes.  My brothers were adept at mowing over hapless snakes.  My sister and I ran.), and the possiblity of thrown stones blinding us, or of rusty/loosened/deadly mower blades throwing themselves at our innocent lower legs, it was not dangerous work. It was fun.

It was not fun when we hit rocks or roots hard enough to knock the blade off balance, thus necessitating a trip into town and the spending of money.  But finding the most efficient ways to navigate the mini-terrain was nice strategy.  In fact, it was meditation.  The drone of the mower, the smell of the gas, the bite of insects, sweating out every toxin our bodies could drum up, pushing and walking and singing and being all alone, while bringing peace and order to our small world. 

By the time I was old enough to mow, hand-pushed gas-powered mowers were the norm.  After all kids moved away, Mom and Dad eventually got a riding mower which Dad used.  Given the un-golf-course-like terrain of the yard, it wasn't all that effective, but that was not an issue because Mom kept doing the intricate mowing areas with her push mower.

But before the gas mower and the riding mower, the rotary blade was used.  It's clacking sound is permanently merged in my head with humid summer days and evenings.  One old wooden-handled specimen remained around the barn for decades, to trim up small areas of yard and entertain kids.

My Sears rotary-blade mower/ reincarnation requires a little more upper-body maneuvering.  It does NOT mow in nice, crisp lines with evenly and thoroughly mowed results. The results look more like goats were staked out to munch it down, clumpishly.  And it does not mulch anything, which leaves an overall yard-ly look that is not highly sought-after ( I find it interesting). BUT.  Its that soft non-definition, lack of precision, and meandering cutting-style of the rotary blade that makes it primo in my heart.  The yard looks kind of like a picture I once saw of Mark Twain's yard, minus the goats: misty, serviceable, pre-mass technology.  Friendly and faulted.

Once in a while, I'll be clickety-clacking with my mower in the tiny yard round the front of my tiny house, and some passerby will smile and wave at the old woman with the nostalgic mower.  I smile and act like I'm nearly a saint, and a paragon Eco-warrior, and we pass in the summer sunlight like descendants of the Leave-it-to-Beaver-Cleaver family.   I don't have opportunity very often to acknowledge to said passersby that its really like hauling a dinosaur around the yard, with limited performance.  But thats not whats important, anyway.  A lot of us mature folk, having survived numerous technology improvements, just love doing things without an engine: using our own power,  smelling the grass, and reliving good memories.