Mow big deal

The most common reaction of folks to me arranging for a company to mow my front lawn was a variation of “What took you so long?” Fair question. In facr, my Blogging Body™ Roger Green left a comment on the post linked above (direct link to the comment). He wrote:

You get to make your own choices, of course. But I've been saying to myself for at least a couple of years, "Why doesn't he just get someone else to mow? He doesn't seem to be getting any joy from it." AND your list of To Do kept getting longer and longer and… So good on you.

There was a time when I quite liked doing the mowing: Back when I began doing it, when the lawns were still some patches of grass, some weeds, and a whole lot of bare clay. I rralised recently that this house is actually the first one where I’ve mowed lawns since I moved form my paretns’ house to Chicago, more than 40 years ago. Between there and moving to New Zealand, I lived in apartments, and here in New Zealand, we had two houses with lawns that we hired companies to mow, as well as three houses that had no lawns. So, it was a sort of nostalgic adventure for me, I guess. But as the mowing became harder on me physically, the novelty truly wore off.

There, of course, other factors I’ve spoken about in the past. First, and the biggest one, was that I bought a battery-powered mower and also have a battery-powered line trimmer, both of which I recharge using solar power as part of my desire to tread more lightly on the planet. I knew that mowing services all use petrol-powered machines, and which are polluting, obviously. I needed time to adjust to the need to compromise my values.

As time passed, however, the physical challenge becamse hared to tolerate. Up until this year, mowing was my biggest form of exercise by far. Now, of course, I walk every day, often farther than a mowing adventure provided. I think it’s kind of ironic that the main reason I felt it was time to stop mowing the front is that doing it became increasingly hard on me physically, especially if I did both lawns in one session. So: My biggest form of exercise became too hard, even though I now do daily walks—or was it because the mowing is now on top of those daily walks? Actually, it could just be one simple word: Age.

Regardless of why mowing the front became physically difficult for me, it certainly did. I needed time to accept that reality, and the implication that this will be a repeating reality the older I get. If I’m truly honest with myself, this was actually a far bigger thing for me to adject to than compromising my values was.

Despite all those barriers, there was something I was quite keen to leave behind: Unnecessary stress. As I said when I announced the change, “the front lawn is the only one anyone sees, so it’s important it’s always tidy—but making sure it’s tidy puts pressure on me that isn’t helpful.”

This brings me, in a round about way, to my “To Do” list. It is indeed of extraordinary length—well, more accurately, they are, because I have several different ones. I really must write the blog post about that I’ve planned for ages—and, of course, I even created a list for future blog posts, though the “To Do” list one isn’t on it. The larger point is that all those lists exist because I forget the same things constantly and repeatedly, and so, their real purpose is to reduce the stress that the constant forgetting, remembering, and forgetting again was stressing me out. Listing literally everything I need to do “sometime or other” means I can check anytime I want to see what I have to do, so I don’t actualy have to remember any of it (I put urgent things on my calendar or Reminders App so I’ll get specific on-time reminders). As it happens, most of the stuff on my “To Do” list(s) isn’t urgent.

All of that combined is what both drove my decision to hire mowers to do the front lawn, and also “what took me so long” to get to that point. There’s almost always a story or two behind our stories. This is just an example of that.

The photo up top is a kind of, sorty of, “before and after” of the front law. The “before” is actually from a 2022 blog post. I took the photo on the right shortly after the mower left, but I never even thought of taking a photo before he started. Oops. Fortunately, I have an archive of relevant photos, because that 2022 photo is pretty much what it looked like the day it was mowed.