A brutal mowing season

By Bobby Neal Winters

It has been a brutal summer of mowing, but I am not complaining. That may seem like a self-contradictory sentence, so let me explain.

As has been said, and more often that once, there is nothing free in this world but the Grace of God.  Having a lawn is no exception to this.  If you want to have a lawn, you are going to have to mow.

I look at that sentence, and it is dripping with potential. It could be adopted by self-help gurus.  There could be weekend workshops on it.  It could be put on t-shirts with evocative pictures. There could be coffee mugs with it on sale on Amazon.

It could be my gateway to fame, to fortune, to immortality.

But I digress. 

Those who are not in the lawn game, don’t realize what all is involved in it.  The basic framework of mowing is scheduling. An example of a classic setup for this would be mowing every Saturday.  Sunday, go to church; Monday, go to work; Saturday, go to mow.

It works well on paper.

But what if it rains all day Saturday?

Well, if your religion doesn’t prohibit it, you go to Sunday. If it does, then you are knocked into the workweek, and you have to try to fit it around work. If you can’t, you’d better learn your Bible well enough to open up Sunday.

Now even if you do manage to get your mowing in, your lawn will not be quite as tall as it ought to be the next time, so you are off schedule.

The system that was so pretty on paper has been ripped apart by one rainy day.

One rainy day.

Over the years, reality has forced me to take that ideal schedule and modify it.  It has evolved to fit the environment, shall we say. 

As I’ve grown older and time has extracted its price from me, I’ve been forced to divide my mowing responsibilities into three parts and to spread the mowing process over three days.  But even before that happened, I’d made the discovery that in this part of the country you can cheat the system.  At the beginning of the season, you can mow every eight days, and then, as the frequency of rain decreases naturally as part of the progression of summer, you can correspondingly decrease your frequency of mowing.

Typically, after the Fourth of July, you can adopt a 14-day cycle.

I said, typically. Resting on that word “typically” is why I am not complaining about a “brutal” summer of mowing.

There are outliers from the typical.  In one direction, the outliers take us to not having to mow from the Fourth of July until October because “decreased frequency of rain” translates into “stopped raining entirely.” 

The last time that happened “didn’t have to mow” translated into “you shouldn’t mow because of the dust.” Grass died; crops died; the landscape looked apocalyptic. 

This summer has been an outlier from the typical in the other direction.  It kept raining. There were days when the lawn needed mowing but to do so would’ve required mowing through puddles. 

The frequency of rain has decreased, but we are “getting rain at the right time.”  That is to say, not so much water as to make a puddle, but enough to keep the grass growing at an atypically fast pace.

So “brutal” means I’ve not been able to expand to that 14-day cycle I aim for.

While rain is the restraining factor during the early part of the season, heat controls the schedule now.  I have people who constrain me from mowing when it is too hot because I am old, decrepit, and don’t have sense enough to judge for myself.

I have to choose an hour here and an hour there around my torturous summer schedule of coffee with the lads and woodworking.

Like I said, “Brutal.”

All the brutality aside, there is hope.

Slowly, some increasing number of seconds every day, the days are getting shorter. Autumn will eventually be upon us. September will come, then October.  Mowing will pause for a while.

We can rest then and restart next March.

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.