Succulent
I mowed the lawn this evening. It was the first time that I had mowed the lawn in over a month. So it really needed it. A month is a long time to go without mowing, but somewhat fortunately, May was an almost bone dry month. The lawn tonight, before I began didn’t look that much taller than when I returned from California, almost two weeks ago. It did look stragglier, but it hadn’t grown any more.
I couldn’t even contemplate mowing the lawn last week. It was all that I could do to drag myself into work the last two days of the work week and then back home again. I was going to mow it last weekend, but pleasure activities got in the way. Chinese lanterns and Shakespeare at night and bicycling by day filled our weekend up. I was going to mow the lawn on Monday, but our first rain in a month precluded that idea. It was a good summer downpour. Tuesday night was all about the transit of Venus, so there was no chance of mowing that night either. I guess that my only excuse for Wednesday is this, I had biked in the morning both Monday and Tuesday mornings and I was too tired to mow the lawn that night. I did not bicycle this morning, so I had no such excuse. Besides, Anne has been working so hard on repainting the bathroom, I felt shamed not to contribute in some way to the maintenance of the homeland. She has been one scrappy scraper this week.
I’ve mowed my share of lawns in my day. I started mowing the family lawn in junior high. That quickly branched out into a business of lawn mowing. We were living in a Maryland suburb of Washington and business was pretty good. I charge $4 to mow or $5 if you wanted the grass bagged. I didn’t trim and I didn’t do windows. I also discouraged bagging. It took too long. This was at the tail end of the sixties, so $4 or $5 dollars went a lot further back then. Gas was probably near $0.25 back then. Food, my other fuel, was even cheaper, it was free to me. Once I got going, I bought my own mower. It was the ugliest shade of green, but it was self-propelled and I called it the ‘tank’. It weighed a ton and for being ‘self-propelled’ didn’t always carry its weight.
When we moved to Michigan, I was old enough to take on real employment. I worked for apartment complexes, mainly doing mowing. This continued through most of college. After graduation, I got a real job and worked that. Eventually, we bought a house and that house had a lawn. It just so happens that that lawn was the same one that I mowed tonight.
