When I mow the back lawn I divide it into sections, four of them, not equal in size but equally difficult. The sloped sides are more difficult than the flat parts which is why they are smaller. The spidery side of the fence is worse than the sunny side so it is also smaller. This is the same way I eat, dividing the plate into sections. I don't want salad to touch bread. I don't want bread to touch vegetables. I deal with each section in its entirety before moving on to the next. Is this a symptom of OCD? (Yes.)
I like mowing the lawn. I like it the same way I like painting a room, because I can see significant change and progress in a relatively short period of time. A few hours of work yields big results. This is the problem I have with teaching. Six months into the investment things often look pretty much the same, and sometimes I could swear we're going backward. I want to see that we're making progress. I like seeing a wake of good behind me.
A woman from work called me Rocky Balboa this afternoon. Maybe she was referring to the bruise under my eye caused by the wasp who flew into my face and stung me while I was mowing the lawn today. Or maybe she was alluding to how quickly and clearly I express myself in English. Read into this what you will, but I prefer to think she was complimenting me on my impressive biceps, the product of mowing that third of an acre with a push mower once a week.
I think I accidentally went on a date tonight with a man who was not my husband. He was nice but it was strange to be dating again, unexpectedly this way after all these years. Shawn says I'm allowed to see him again if I want to which is demonstrative of his confidence, or of his liberal-mindedness, or perhaps of how much he values all I bring to his life. Funny how he gets all bossy about what shoes I wear while mowing the lawn but doesn't mind me dating on a Saturday night.
Last night Shawn snored so loudly he gave me a nightmare that the lawnmower was broken.
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4 comments:
That was really careless of me, I meant to leave my post about cutting grass on this post, but I left it on the previous post. I am usually more careful than that.
While I'm at it the post I did leave the post on says that you think your boring.
That can't be, your interested in too many things. Maybe you have high expectations of exciting. Anyway, I don't really know that so I should quit now. All the best:)
I've responded there too because it makes the boring less boring if we're talking about mowing over there too, doesn't it?
Oh, no. Not the broken lawnmower nightmare. I can relate. When we owned a house with a couple acres of land, I mowed it with our old John Doe tractor which had to be repaired every time it left the barn. Finally, we replaced it with a Craftsman 28HP tractor, red, which I adored but only got to use ONCE before we sold the house (and lawn equipment.) I still miss my tractor all these years later, and the zen pleasure of cutting visible rows into the grassy slopes and stealing a bit of neighboring woodland every time. (Maybe that's why the damn thing kept breaking, but I didn't have a bulldozer.)
I live in a divided neighbourhood. About half the residents own tractors and about half, like me, are stubbornly doing it the hard way. We don't, in my opinion, have enough land to justify a tractor, but a lot of the neighbours disagree. I think mowing with a tractor would be great fun, but I'd miss the struggle of using brute force to push that heavy machine through the moss and grass. I envy your tractor memories though... maybe I should join the tractor team?
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