Building Wall

 Building Wall

By Bobby Neal Winters

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’

--Robert Frost

My driveway is parallel to my neighbor’s property.  There is a strip of land a few feet wide between the drive and where his lot begins.  His lot is a few feet higher than mine, and in the past there was a tendency for soil to wash from the higher ground onto my driveway.  This was just nature: gravity and water.

I forget when it was, so I am going to say it was twenty years ago, I built a retaining wall out of landscaping timbers. I did this without a plan, without advice.  Then I filled the area between the drive and the wall with brick, flat against the ground to keep grass from growing there.

And it worked...for a while.

Recently, however, it has become a mess.  Weeds have grown up through it and it is difficult to mow around.

I decided that something needed to be done.

The first step was to take out the old wall.  This was kind of an education. My mantra has been that it is easier to tear down than it is to build up, but I need to remember that is a relative statement. Tearing down was a sweaty job, and I never actually tore down the wall I’d made with landscaping timbers. Those timbers are there even yet. 

The hard part was the bricks. I’d used about 100 bricks to fill the area between the landscaping timbers and my drive.  They are sitting stacked neatly on my driveway even as I write this. Digging them out with a shovel, bending over my belly to pick them up, and then stacking them neatly in a pile required considerable effort. Thankfully Jean was there to help.

In the two decades since I built my old retaining wall, I’ve learned a lot of things. One of those things is that I am stupid; I can’t just make stuff up as I go along and expect it to go well.  Because of this, I got on YouTube and found a video--several actually--on building a retaining wall.

You should have a base of gravel of a certain depth, so I dug a ditch as long as my wall and filled it with gravel.  The gravel needs to be tamped down, so I bought a tamper and tamped it. As you lay your blocks, you need to tamp them down with a rubber mallet.

My neighbor came over about this stage of the process to see what I was doing.  He was curious because seeing me do anything physical is something of a novelty.  I brought him up to speed on it and we talked about our luck, or lack thereof, on such projects.

Once you get your first course of blocks laid on the gravel base, it is like putting together Legos, forty-pound Legos, but Legos but Legos nevertheless. 

When the wall is up, you need to fill in between the dirt and the wall with gravel so as to allow the water from the higher level to flow down.

I still need to do that part, so I will be making trips to Home Despot for gravel today.

Is the wall perfect? No, but it doesn’t look bad and it suits the person who paid for it: Me.  It will be easier to mow around and easier to keep presentable.

At least that’s the plan.

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. )

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year, as the attentive reader may recall, I made the switch from ICE (internal combustion engine) mowing to battery-powered mowing.  I gave periodic reports on that last year and it all went great, as experiments like that always do.

When you make a switch to something it is because you want it to work.  You think that it is cool and everything you do is colored by the glow of your desires.  This is why the scientific method was developed: We know that we lie to ourselves, so we set up a structure to try to keep us honest.

I didn’t do any of that when I got my new battery-powered Ryobi mower. It was 2020 and I had absolutely no desire to take the glow off of anything. I needed all the glow I had, as I am sure you did too.

Now we’ve had winter; I’ve been fully vaccinated; the mask mandate has been lifted. There ain’t nothin’ but blue skies ahead now, Bro.

How is the battery-powered mower holding up now?

I believe I can be objective now because the shine has literally been worn-off of it. It is plastic so that means instead of scratching the paint you scratch the plastic.  And it has scratches.

But nothing has broken so far.

It is lighter than a metal mower and I do believe that has reduced the fatigue factor involved in mowing.

I absolutely do not miss the gasoline aspect.  It was awkward to go get gas for my gas mower.  In my dad’s day, that was easy. You filled up your car tank and then filled your mower using a siphoning hose.  Get ready to mow and gargle with gas at the same time; the chick’s really dug it.

But I found having to put a gas can in your car, schlepping it to Casey’s, filling it up, and then schlepping it back to be inconvenient.  

Now I have two batteries and I keep one of them charging all the time.

I have been asked whether I have to have the two batteries.  This is to say, can I finish daily mowing without changing the battery?

Let’s put this in context.  Back in the day when I was young, and my heart was an open book, I used to mow my whole lawn, front and back, in one go.  In those days, I would stop after the front was mowed and refill the mower with gas; this is the moral equivalent of a battery change.  But this ever-changing world in which we’re living made me older, so I now mow the front yard one day and the backyard the next.

When I did that, I didn’t have to stop to refill anymore.  Now I can mow the front yard with one battery and it is not even close.  The backyard is a closer thing.  When I do the first mowing of the year, the grass is very thick, so in the two season inaugural mows, I’ve had to change the battery both times.  

Last year, the first mowing was the only mowing I had to use two batteries.  This year the rain has mixed things up.  The first mowing, as I said, required both of my batteries, but then I went a few mowings with just one battery. Yesterday, the rain had forced me to go nine days instead of seven or eight.  And the grass was wet.  I had to use the second battery for just a few minutes.

Are battery-powered mowers a panacea?  No, no they aren’t.  You do have to modify the way you do things.  But they are quiet; they are convenient; there is less upkeep.

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. )

Landscaping as a Means of Grace

 Landscaping as a Means of Grace

By Bobby Neal Winters

John Wesley would say that God is continually improving us through his grace if we do what He says. James the brother of Jesus said, “Faith without works is dead.” Home Depot says we have that on sale.

Last summer during the lockdown, I became reacquainted with my shovel. The first thing that happened was that our dog Charlie died and I had to dig him a grave.  He was a biggish dog so I had to dig him a biggish/deepish grave, and in doing that I discovered that the shovel was comfortable in my hand.

I topped the grave off with a couple of pavers so that we wouldn’t lose Charlie.  His buddy Obidiah is barking at thin air, so his days are numbered on this earth.  It would be disturbing to find Charlie while burying Obie; therefore we mark his grave.

Pavers, as it turns out, are not all that expensive.  We had a path we continually used across the back yard that was a muddy mess whenever it rained. As a solution to this, I made a nice walkway with weed cloth, sand, pavers, and river pebbles.  (How do I know they were river pebbles? It said it right there on the bag in both English and Spanish.)

It is a thing of beauty, let me tell you.  After having finished that, I decided I wanted a fire pit.  There was a place in my backyard that had been a continual source of problems. These were mainly problems caused by us: We stack rocks there; we stacked brush there; the good folks at the City would occasionally write us nice letters about it.  

We decided to cure that problem by building our firepit there.

Now, I’ve called it a fire pit.  It is actually a tiny patio where I can put a metal contraption that Home Despot calls a fire pit.  Pits are on the ground; barbeque grills are in the air; this is between.

This allowed me to reorder a lot of other landscaping elements to this tiny patio.

And I looked at what I had done and saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were November, so I stopped for the year.  My family complained it was too cold to use the fire pit. How can it be too cold to use a fire pit?  You got fire right there in it.

But now spring has sprung.  There had been an old picnic table in the back yard that Charlie had used like Snoopy’s dog house, but as I mentioned earlier, Charlie is no longer with us.  Obie is too blind and senile to even find a table.  The table itself was broken.  The metal had rusted so as to render it only safe enough to be a dog’s fantasy airplane.

Because of this, I borrowed my youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s angle-grinder, and took it apart, leaving the wood in nice shape.  I didn’t even know how expensive wood was at the time.

I then, using the skills I’d honed to perfection earlier, made a little patio where the table had been.  I am looking for a second hand garden table to put on it.  The folks at Home Despot are mighty proud of theirs.

The yard looks a lot better, and I feel like a better person.

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. )

 The Mercury Tracer

By Bobby Neal Winters

Those of you who are old like me will remember the days when there were Fords, Mercuries, and Lincolns.  They were in a continuum like that.  You started out with a Ford and as you climbed the ladder you would get a Mercury and when you had climbed to the top you would get a Lincoln. I don’t think I am going to use this as a metaphor in the rest of the column, I am just trying to jog your memories a bit because they don’t make Mercuries any more and I will need you to be thinking about Mercury automobiles.

Just before Jean and I got married, Jean’s mom Janet got a brand new Mercury Tracer.  A Mercury Tracer.  See, I said it twice, and you still didn’t recognize it as a type of car.  You might’ve thought it was some special kind of glowing ammunition.

Back in the day, the Tracer was Mercury’s version of the Ford Escort.  You need to further understand that in the 1980s, the Ford Escort was not the palace on wheels that it eventually came to be.  It was still quite small, and the Mercury Tracer was as well.  It was exactly like the Escort with a somewhat nicer trim.  I drove it from here to Tulsa once and had to rub my shoulders with vaseline to get it.   It is a four-on-the floor standard transmission with no AC. (I don’t think it has AC. You’d have to turn it on to know.)  It would go from 0 to 60 in...we will tell you when it happens.

It was Janet’s car until the day she died.  

The paint is faded by the sun, and it’s battery died this winter when the polar vortex hit, but I think of it as Janet’s new car.

We had Janet’s funeral yesterday as I write this.  She was not a person to force herself on anyone.  She was not one to force her opinions on anyone. She was a modest person, with modest needs, who took care of the people around her in a modest, steady way.

The human species is a strange thing.  While we--especially in our modern world--have a tendency toward individualism, we are in fact a social animal.  We talk like we are Paul Simon “I am a Rock, I am an Island,” in truth we are John Donne “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...”.  Our individuality is played out as being part of the group.  

I went to Rotary President Elect Training a number of years back.  There you find yourself surrounded by what I’ve come to think of as “Main Street” type people.  These are fine people.  They come at the world through a different set of metaphors than I do, so sometimes it takes me years to understand them.  What they make of me, I can only guess.  Anyway, one of the speakers posed a means of evaluating members by the question: “Are they a work horse, or are they a show horse?”

After years of mediating on this simple question, I’ve come to realize this isn’t really a scale with one end high and the other end low.  It is a classification of necessary types.  The human race needs the show horses as well as the work horses. We need those gleaming people who are bright and shiny and can make us feel good just by smiling at us, just by deigning to notice us.

But they are really very expensive and very high-maintenance so we really can’t afford many of them.

We really need more of those people who will quietly get in and do the jobs no one else really wants to do.  We need those people who will be the first one in the field to work in the morning and the last one to leave in the evening and then cook a meal and do dishes before bedtime.   

The people who get a new Lincoln every year are fine.  I admire the ones for whom a Mercury Tracer every four decades is enough.

We will miss you Janet.

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. )

Dear Graduates

 Dear Graduates

By Bobby Neal Winters

You are now graduating from college in the time of COVID.  Nothing is normal; neither New Normal nor otherwise.  But there are some eternal things that are happening now: Your parents are proud; your grandparents' hearts fill their chests; you are going off to start on something new.  

And if you are like I was, you don’t have a clue.  Even though you might be highly educated, there are some things that you may still need to learn.

One of these things--and the quicker you learn it the better off you will be--is how to separate money out for a particular purpose and pretend that you don’t have it until you use it for that purpose.  

Get a flower pot or a mayonnaise jar and put your pocket change in it.  If you get the urge to buy a lottery ticket, put the money in your flower pot instead. If you get the urge to buy a pack of cigarettes, put the money you would’ve spent in that flower pot.

When you get so much, you are nervous having it in the house, put it in the bank.  When you get tired of not drawing any interest on it, buy some stock. Whatever.  Develop the habit of putting money aside for a fixed-purpose and stick with it. It will work better if it is a small amount done on a regular basis.

Exercise on a regular basis.  Not strenuously for hours once a week because you won’t do it.  Do twenty minutes a day.  Every day.  Make it a thing. You don’t have to buy any equipment; you don’t have to get a membership at the Y, although that is a fine thing if you actually use it.  My personal choice is walking. Walking is free by the way and you get to keep engaged with your surroundings. But do a little bit everyday.

You only get one body. That is it.  You really need to take care of it. Regardless of how well you take care of your body, you will die one day.  That can’t be helped.  But your body needs to be used.  Think of it as being an old car for which they no longer make parts. You have to take care of the ones there are.

Negotiate for yourself.  This doesn’t mean to be a jerk.  Indeed, the best negotiations are done civilly. Pick the words that fit your style, but engage in give and take.  This might come naturally to you, but most likely it won’t.  Ask questions.  Don’t be afraid to look stupid.  Actually, try to give up being afraid just as a matter of course.  

Don’t be afraid to turn and walk away.  This part is easier if you’ve taken my first bit of advice about saving money.  Know yourself; know what you can do.  Know your own value.

There are lots of other things that you don’t know, but if you can do even one of what I’ve said, you will be better off.

Go forth and be a good person.

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. )