NALM, the Real World, and Rejoice!

By Bobby Neal Winters

Those of you who follow this space may have taken note of the fact that there hasn’t been a column on mowing this year.  This isn’t because I haven’t been mowing.  Indeed, I’ve been mowing and appreciating the act of mowing more than I have in years.

I do continue to mow.

The reasons for not writing about it are rather complicated.

In order to set the stage, let us all recall last year’s mowing season: It was a disaster.

While ordinarily my backyard sports what is known as the “Great Brown Spot” and is no doubt a mystery for astronomers on Jupiter, by the end of June last year, the “Great Brown Spot” extended from my backyard to Great Bend. Any mowing I did after the middle of June was just to cut off the tops of the grass in any portion of the lawn which had accidentally gotten water.

If we hadn’t’ve been between dogs at that time, I would’ve been able to pick out the spots where they liked to pee.  It was that dry.

While our drought had a big impact on lawns, it had a larger impact on the lawn mowing community as a whole, and, of course, on NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers.

Lawn mowing is big business, and I am not just talking about those plucky groups of individuals who go around town with mowers and weed-wackers in trailers doing God’s work on a lawn by lawn basis.

No. 

I am talking about the bloated corporate entities who sell mowers, weed-wackers, and all of the accouterments associated with them.  There is money being made from the sweat of the backs of honest, lawn-mowing, God-fearing Americans my friends. (Probably in the rest of the world too, but my reach is not that far.)

Just like in every other danged thing in the world, the money grubbing capitalist vampires have stuck their corporate fangs into...

But I digress.

NALM on its Facebook page posts its mission statement as follows: “We seek to spread the spiritual, health, and aesthetic benefits of lawn mowing to support our Nation.”

To give them the benefit of the doubt, I will say that is true, at least initially.

We live in a dark, old world, my friends.  A fallen world.

You grow up, go to Sunday school, learn about Jesus, and then they send you out into a world where everyone has sharp teeth and you look like filet mignon. You have to be as innocent as doves and as wily as serpents, let me tell you.

And NALM has been.  

It went out into the world with its ideals of saving the world through lawn mowing, but it has had to learn how to live in that world.

For example, it is an environmentally conscious group. It figures that it would be because lawns are part of the environment.  Because of this, it supported the use of battery powered lawnmowers. 

As a result of this, some of us switched over to battery powered.  However, this was a move fraught with controversy, and not just from the ICE (internal combustion engine) supporters.  No, the environmental wing of NALM is itself fractured.  Within it, there are those who say battery-powered is not going far enough.

There are those within the Mowing Community who believe we should abandon “power-mowing” all together and go back to push mowing.

I sense some knitted eyebrows out there.

Push-mowers are mowers that rely neither on electric motors nor ICE. You “just” have to push them. Most of the people who advocate such are either too old for anyone to imagine them mowing themselves or are individuals who give off kind of a “John Brown’s Body Lies a Moldering in the Grave” vibe.  You inch away from them after you begin to understand what they are saying.

There are even those who say you should just leave it unmown.

Balancing those out, there are those who say you should just concrete it over and paint it green.

NALM has to live within that world with all the rest of us.

To sum it up, I’ve not written about mowing so as to avoid controversy, but I avoid it no more.

While this summer has been hot, we’ve had rain. Not only have we’ve had rain, we’ve had it at the right time to keep the grass growing all summer long.

While a younger version of myself would be complaining, after last year’s drought, I will rejoice.  As I write this, I am planning to go out and mow my daughter’s lawn. (Okay, I have three daughters, two of whom have lawns in town. I’m only going to mow one of those. It’s not yours.)  Not only am I going to mow it, I am going to mow it with an ICE because her lawn is so nasty a battery just won’t do.

In any case, Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice. We’ve had rain and we can mow, so let us praise the Lord.

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.