On the show's Twitter account today - which really should be about the show, but since the show doesn't always have a lot to say, & usually only has something to say from four to six pm on Tuesdays, so I will often fill it with my mundane thoughts & embarrassingly obvious observations - I tweeted about my backyard.
Damn do we have a big backyard. I didn't really want the house we live in, actually. It's too big for us, even when us is two humans, four dogs, & four cats. But my wife wanted the house, & she wanted it much more than I didn't want it. Honestly, I guess I didn't care. But I wish, when I was thinking about this house, I had thought about mowing.
Mowing the backyard - this is just the backyard - takes me about ninety minutes. That's a hell of a time commitment. Plus, I don't apparently get better at mowing - I don't appear to be able to learn new mowing strategies that can shave minutes off my average mowing time. If there were some "mowing skills plateau," I reached it pretty quickly. It takes an hour & a half for me to mow my backyard.
It takes me longer to mow the front, but that's the wife's responsibility, since she also wants to do insane shit like blow excess grass off the sidewalks & edge.
If there's a reason why I'm not good at mowing, it may be because I lived in apartments for the first twenty years of my life. The only time I mowed was when I was paid for it by my older siblings & it was their yard(s). & I worked cheap. Probably did a terrible job too.
When I rented houses or duplexes in Austin, the owners paid to have the yards done "professionally." I had to buy a lawn mower only when we bought our first house, in 2005.
It's been downhill from then.
& yet. I don't think I would be comfortable with a "riding mower." You know who uses a riding mower? The seventy-something-year-old man next door. He looks so happy on it. & perhaps that's one of the reasons I resist: who wants to be happy mowing a lawn?
Would I feel better about mowing the backyard if I had grown up being required to take care of our own back yard? It's hard to say. My mother never made me & my little brother do chores when we were kids - I doubt she would've made us mow a lawn. More than likely, she would have done it. The reasons why are more complicated than I have time to go into. But infantilizing her sons has made it difficult for them to move away from her, which is why most of them live within a few miles of her to this day.
Okay, I went into it some.
Anyway, that's why I was talking about my backyard today. I should probably mow it once a week, but I said that last year. & the year before that.
Through it all, my backyard, mowed or unmowed, wet or dry, green or brown, it mocks me. All day long.
Let me check. Yes. All night long, too.
1 comment:
Growing up I had no discipline. Once I let the lawn grow, unmowed for a month. The grass grew to nearly knee height. My friends laughed at me and my neighbors cursed me. Every five feet I had to stop the lawn mower to empty it. Ultimately if I remember correctly, my mom had to get a lawn service to finish the job. I learned that if you let the grass grow long enough, it starts to look like a grain and not so much like Nature's carpet.
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