Dad's Lawn

I have a tiny little lawn at my house. Really, I have two lawns. A patch in the front and a patch in the back. Sue does a nice job with the plants in the yard, of which there are many. Most of them have flowers, and they all seem to bloom at different times, which means that the yard is very pretty from spring to late summer. It also means that bees and hornets camp out here through both seasons as well. Sue grows raspberries and strawberries as well, and we always have far more than we know what to do with.

The grass is a different story. Because of the frequent rain, the grass grows fast here (and the weeds faster). It typically needs to be mowed about once every week and a half. Which means that I mow about every two weeks.

I hate mowing. The whole process takes me about 35 to 45 minutes, from walking into the garage to find my "yard work" shoes -- a super cheap pair of sneakers I bought in England on our honeymoon when I realized that I forgot to pack any walking shoes but which turned out to be worse than if I had walked around and seen the sites in my nice shoes because they were so cheap -- to walking back into the house covered in pollen and grass clippings (all of which I'm allergic to). Despite the short time it takes, I dread it every time.

Part of my dread is my aforementioned allergies. But really, they're not that bad, and I'm only out there a few minutes. Part of it is that I have little interest in those kinds of green-thumb-ish kinds of things. Aside from mowing, I used to hardly go into the yard at all -- it was too small to "do" anything out there anyway -- but getting Rufus and now Marley has made me intimately familiar with my yard. There's just not that much to do out there while I wait -- and oftentimes wait, and wait . . . and wait -- for the puppy to get the job done. She certainly finds the place far more interesting than I do.

But mostly I dread mowing because I tell myself that I don't have time for this kind of thing. I'm a busy guy. Shouldn't I just hire someone to do this? These thoughts, however, always take me back to my childhood.

Growing up, we had an enormous yard. Multiple acres. So big, each section had a name: the back yard, the front yard, the side yard, and the play yard (a big area so named because it had a swing set and a sandbox, but most of it was just a wooded, orchardlike place that was larger than a fair number of urban parks I've seen).

My dad loved mowing the yard (still does, although it's a different yard now). We had a pushmower, a riding mower, and a really big tractor/mower that literally could not turn around in my existing front or back yard, let alone mow it. Puts to shame my little electric mower that I literally plug into an outdoor socket. What I do with my little plug-in mower is closer to vacuuming than the mowing I did at my childhood home.

My dad tried to instill in me his love of lawn care. It didn't work. Mowing the lawn often involved getting up early on a Saturday. It involved physical labor and getting dirty. It involved not watching TV, reading a book, or hanging out with my friends. All of these points, particularly at that time, were big strikes against it.

So I always thought to myself, "If you love it and I don't, why don't you just do it?" See, this is the part that I'm reminded of nowadays when I think that I'm too busy to mow my little postage stamp of a yard. My dad started his own office-supply business which grew into a large business. In fact, he did that twice, and both businesses still thrive. He started the largest vocational school in that area of the country. He served as both president of the school board and mayor of the town we lived in. And he had a family with five kids. And he did a lot more things as well. And still he took care of that big yard.

Of course he needed help with it. And what's more, he wanted taking care of the yard to be something that we could do together. I couldn't see either of those things back then. But I do now.

So, as busy as I am, I'm not too busy to mow my lawn. I still don't like it, and frankly I'm willing to bet that most people who know me (or of me) have a tough time imagining me pushing a mower and mucking around with grass clippings. But it's far too deeply ingrained in me not to. The past isn't just some stuff that happened, but it's the things that went into making us the way we are today. And my dad's not just some guy, but he's someone who was instrumental in creating the person I am and always will be.

Happy Father's Day.

 

 

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