A Time of Preparation

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in late April, and while I’ve already mowed my back yard for the first time, we are still in the time of lawn preparation.

The full value of preparation and planning has been a difficult lesson for me to learn. I suppose this is because of my heritage. When my father was born, his family were sharecroppers. There is an important difference between sharecroppers and farmers which is the ownership of the land. Farmers get to keep the improvements, but sharecroppers not so much.

Regardless of that, my father’s family transitioned from being sharecroppers to being itinerant oilfield workers.  And from that, my dad transitioned to being a truck driver who hauled bulk cement. (WWII was somewhere in there.)

My point being that while each of these modes of existence does require a certain amount of preparation, in the first two, especially, you need to be ready to see all you have prepared simply disappear.  The sharecropper is on the land at the pleasure of the landowner.  The itinerant oilfield worker will, by definition, have to leave very rarely with more than the clothing on his back.

But I get it now.  Preparation is the most important part of the job.  Indeed, with preparation done correctly, the rest of the job simply falls into place: ergo, preparation is the job.

Let’s talk about some examples.

We will start with painting. I thought I knew how to paint until a friend from church taught me how. You gather your supplies with painter’s tape among them.  Then you tape all of your woodwork. Having done that, you go around the edges with your brush and paint a margin round the wall.  This is your preparation phase.  The rest can be done by rollers.  I’d put off painting my dining room for ten years before learning this; after learning it, I painted it in a single morning.

Now, for everyone’s favorite: cleaning the kitchen. To be clear here, I am using the nomenclature “cleaning the kitchen” the activity some call “washing the dishes.” Cleaning the kitchen describes the activity much more accurately. Here I speak from a much more theoretical perspective having seen it done more than doing it myself, but again preparation is the key. 

Everything works much better when you start with an empty trashcan and an empty dishwasher (or an empty dish drainer if you are not there yet). To make the task of washing the dishes easier, it is better if you expand it to “cleaning the kitchen” so as to recognize the preparation as part of the process.

Programming a computer works better if you have thought the process through from beginning to end before you start the project. Here, I must confess, that I still mostly program as I go, but I’ve learned, when I do this, I will probably have to go back to the beginning and do it all over.

In my woodworking, the process is immeasurably more gratifying if I’ve thought the whole project through from beginning to end and have gathered all of my materials to the same place.

My writing--and here I am talking specifically about my mathematical writing--is better when I recognize that it is a process and the initial “putting it down on paper” is just a small part. You must first have something to say. Then you must figure out how to say it to yourself.  This is often done in pieces.  It is easier if you save these pieces on yellow paper in file folders, and keep the file folders in one of those brown folders.  Then you type it all in, but that is just the beginning.  You need to let it get cold and reread it in context and tie it all together.

That last bit might have to be done several times.

But now we come to the most important part: Mowing. Mowing is about to become the center of my universe for the next six months. One must first police the yard, i.e. pick up the stick and other sundry detritus; move all of the lawn chairs out of the way; make sure the battery is charged or the gas tank is filled.  

This year I am seriously contemplating putting weed-eating as a normal part of this.  I may have convinced myself that weed-eating serves the same function in lawn mowing, as painting-in does in painting.  I’ve eschewed it thus far as an activity more fit for the grandson of farmers than the grandson of sharecroppers, but perhaps it is time to throw that off.

We shall see.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )