On Mowing the Lawn

Frequently my husband mows our lawn, but today he was otherwise occupied, and I decided to seize the couple hours of rain-free weather for the chore.

The weather in northern New York has been very wet this summer. Finding a dry day to mow has been difficult. When I declared I would mow today, my husband informed me that while I had slept soundly, he had been up during the night closing windows, and that I might find the grass too wet. With that word of caution, I decided to start where the grass is the least dense.

We have a fairly large area to mow. In addition to a normal sort of front yard, and a large back yard, we own two lots out in the middle of the block. We do not have a riding mower. It is a power mower, but not self-propelled. In other words, the mowing is actual work.

I began out in the middle of the block carefully skirting the day lilies. The forget-me-nots are done blooming so that area went under the blade. By the time I got to our back yard, the sun had still not dried out the dense grass. The mower clogged up repeatedly, and I had to stop it to dig the clumps of wet grass out from around the blade with a stick. Then, of course, it had to be restarted. Yank, pull, yank. I tried to occupy myself with pleasant thoughts to keep my mind off the exertion and the sweat pouring off my forehead and stinging my eyes.

The maple trees that volunteered themselves in the now unused garden area are really getting tall. One is almost 10 feet. The lilac bushes have finally grown to the point that there are enough blossoms to cut for bouquets in late spring. The rose bushes are coming along nicely considering that my care-taking is best described as benign neglect. And the tomatoes..oh, yes...the tomato plants are about 5 feet high and loaded with green tomatoes and blossoms. BLT season is not far away.

After an hour and 45 minutes with only a brief break for a glass of water, I finally finished the task and more or less staggered into the house. I grabbed a soda, rationalizing that even if I didn't need the calories, I needed the electrolytes. I spread a beach towel out on the bed, stripped off my perspiration soaked clothing and collapsed on the beach towel. The idea of the beach towel was to keep the bedspread from being saturated with perspiration too. Eventually I recoved enough to shower.

Maybe 64 year old women aren't supposed to push a mower for almost 2 hours. But, I'm thinking that as long as I keep pushing myself, I will die in my tracks, and not do a slow shrivel.