Mowing

When I was kid, I hat­ed to have mow lawns (but I liked the mon­ey). No one pays me to do it now, but I love yard work. This after­noon, I walked straight through the house after arriv­ing home from work and to the shed to get the string trim­mer. I bought a gas-pow­ered string trim­mer a few weeks ago and I’ve been try­ing to mas­ter edg­ing with it. I did­n’t even both­er change clothes. I just start­ed edging.

After get­ting the back yard done, I let the dogs back in (they were trau­ma­tized enough from 20 min­utes of buzzing sounds). I actu­al­ly changed into my mowing/painting clothes and came back out to fin­ish the front yard. I then pulled out the mow­er and got down to busi­ness. I began to think about when I was a teenag­er and I mowed lawns around the block and at the church for mon­ey. I used to lis­ten to thrash met­al (Anthrax, Tes­ta­ment, Pan­tera and Death Angel, how could I for­get DA!) real­ly loud­ly on my old Sony Walk­man. I still get flash­es of head­bang­ing when I’m out whip­ping my push mow­er around.

Now, I see mow­ing the lawn as a kind of relax­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness and pat­terns appeal to my OCD nature. There’s the sense of accom­plish­ment as I close in on the last lit­tle strip of tall grass. The feel­ing of tam­ing some­thing wild. It isn’t because I’m try­ing to impress the neigh­bors, because God knows, my lawn looks like shit (and I have the pho­tos to prove it). I sim­ply enjoy doing it for myself.

Also, Angela recent­ly point­ed out that dur­ing the warm months when I’m mow­ing the lawn reg­u­lar­ly, she thinks I’m slight­ly less of a lazy hus­band than dur­ing the rest of the year. That’s cool, too.

This evening, when I was all fin­ished, I just sat down on the deck bench and began to doze off to the smell of fresh­ly cut grass and gen­tly hum­ming thrash met­al tunes to myself…


Published
Categorized as Life, Music

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

5 comments

  1. I am pret­ty sure Meg will always call me a lazy hus­band. Nice grass.

  2. Oh and since you enjoy mow­ing so much, please know that you are always wel­come to enjoy our yard. I enjoyed it for 5 hours on Sat­ur­day hold­ing a trim­mer and push­ing a mower.

  3. My lawn is about 1/5 the size of yours, and much flat­ter, so yard work lasts about as long as my enthu­si­asm for it. As for the nice grass, well, you’re look­ing at the one nice patch I could find in the back yard.

    Oh, Angela remind­ed as I was post­ing this yes­ter­day evening that I had­n’t done the laun­dry or shred­ded the mail like she asked. I guess we’re both lazy, even if we have nice­ly mowed lawns.

  4. Death Angel: “Room with a View” from Act III. Per­haps the best song ever? At least it was for 2 months when I was 14 or 15. Rock on!!!

  5. Great song. Best of the heavy met­al pow­er bal­lads. Too bad the band was see­ing some suc­cess post-Joshua Tree (aka: the heavy met­al killer). Any­way, they real­ly stood out among the sim­i­lar bands.

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