A cool thing?

This week a cool thing may have happened. Or not. But, at the very least, it was good at the time.

I mowed all the lawns this past Wednesday, which itself is indicative of an important change this year: I’m mowing the lawns every week, though the specific day depends on the weather. My hope has been that by mowing every week I can make each one easier on me. So far, I’ve been able to do the whole thing on on a single battery charge, which is something I couldn’t do when mowing every other week. Live and learn, I suppose, though when the dryness of mid-summer arrives I (probably) won’t need to mow every week.

Even so, every time I’ve mowed the lawns, I inevitably feel awful, especially when doing the front which I find challenging, I think, because the property slopes downhill from my house to the footpath, and because there’s a lot of kikuyu grass (Cenchrus clandestinus), the devil’s spawn if ever there was such a thing, because of how thick and difficult to mow that shit is.

This week, I used the line trimmer on all the edges (front and back), and while my arms started to get tired, I noticed that it didn’t make me feel wiped out. Then came the mowing, which I did immediately after doing the edges, and I felt pretty much as bad as ever. In fact, when I got back into the house I returned a missed call from my sister-in-law, and I joked about planning my funeral.

This is where something changed.

I still had the oscillating fan sitting on my dining table, so I fixed it (no oscillation) on the spot where my chair is, plugged it in and turned it on and then sat down. Because of the new air conditioning, it was cool in the living area, and that fan sent a lovely, constant cool breeze on me. In a relatively short time, I actually felt I’d recovered. This was significant enough that I couldn’t help noticing it, especially because it was maybe half an hour, not the considerably longer time it took when I had no air conditioning in the living area.

The thing is, I have no way of knowing whether this was a one-off—maybe I was just lucky that day?—or if the cooling really made a significant change, one that make my life dramatically easier. I may find out when I mow the lawns next week (right now, it’s looking like Monday my be my only option…), or, maybe not.

I’m hoping that this does represent a change—or, more accurately, a return to the way things were a couple years ago, with a reasonably/comparatively fast recovery time for me. However, I still intend to start handing off the mowing to contractors, beginning with the front, not the least because it’s the most physically challenging part of the mowing for me. This would also mean that the front of my house would always look tidy, and if the back sometimes gets a little too long, no one will see it except for me and Leo. I’ll eventually have mowers do the back, too, so I guess I’m planning for the time ahead when, perhaps, I can’t do as much physical stuff as I can right now.

Even though this may not be a permanent change, it was cool—literally and figuratively—when it happened. I’ll take it.