At Lawn Last

The average last freeze date in Indiana, according to our friends at the Indiana State Climate Office, is April 22. This is the cause for much celebration, knowing winter has hurled its last pitch, until one recalls that when spring darkens the doorway, it is time to mow the lawn. The fact that the second-worst day of the year (the first mowing) falls so close to the worst day of the year (the April 15 tax deadline) is a strong argument against a benevolent deity.

Mowing the lawn is like having a colonoscopy: The preparation is worse than the event. When the high point of an experience is the insertion of a six-foot tube into one’s rear end, one shudders to think just how unpleasant the preceding activity must be. Welcome to lawn mowing.

I approach lawn care the same way I deal with every disagreeable task, by delaying it as long as I can. Since the age of 10, I’ve strenuously avoided any contact with a lawn mower. One summer while in college, I was hired by a corporation to mow its lawn. I spent three months doing everything but mowing and was given a raise and hired back the next summer. I did that by perfecting the illusion of preparing to mow, by walking around the garage all day carrying a lawn mower blade, looking determined to mow, as if I couldn’t wait to get at it.

The actual mowing, the back-and-forth striping of the lawn on my Kubota tractor, is the smallest part of mowing. Getting ready to mow is the lion’s share of the job.

The first step on this journey of 1,000 miles is finding the mower. I have spent the winter piling stuff around and atop it—bicycles, rakes, shovels, a coil of garden hose, maple boards, porch furniture, and the table saw I borrowed from my brother-in-law the previous summer and forgot to return. It takes me a day and a half to find and uncover the mower because that also involves straightening the garage, returning the table saw to my brother-in-law, stacking the maple boards under my workbench, going to the hardware store to buy hooks for hanging the bicycles from the ceiling, carrying the furniture to the porch, and then connecting the garden hose to the outside spigot and winding it around the hose holder. I am six hours into the job, and not one blade of grass has been clipped.

The mower, of course, won’t start. I know this without turning the key. After 30 years of not being able to start my mower in the spring, I merely assume one of the myriad things that can go wrong with a mower will have gone wrong with mine. I walk next door to tell our neighbor my mower is broken. He believes the secret to starting your mower in the spring is storing it correctly in the fall. I like him, but don’t know why, since he seems so pleased by my general lack of competence.

“My mower won’t start,” I told him on the first day of mowing season last year.

“That’s terrible,” he said, grinning broadly. “Did you drain the gas last fall?”

“No.”

“How about the battery? Did you unhook the battery and put it on a trickle charger?”

I shake my head no.

“How’s the spark plug? You did clean the spark plug, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know it was dirty,” I said.

My neighbor rolled his eyes.

It isn’t easy asking for lawn-mower help. Some of my friends are doctors and lawyers whom I consult regularly and without embarrassment. But soliciting mechanical help is humiliating, like not knowing the infield-fly rule. Any man worth his salt should be well-versed in these matters.

“Let me get my toolbox,” my neighbor said. He learned long ago not to depend on my tool collection, which consists mostly of promotional items I’ve received free at county fairs.

He sat on my mower and turned the key. It let out a groan, then a gasp and a cough, like a death rattle.

“I wonder if it’s the electronic ignition module,” he mused.

“I wondered the same thing myself.”

“Then again,” he said, “the choke cable could be disconnected.”

“Those choke cables are a pain in the ass,” I said. I don’t ordinarily use bad words, but working on lawn mowers brings out the worst in me.

“They’re worse than a colonoscopy!” my neighbor said.

“You got that right.”

The mower finally started. I’m not sure how. I would have mowed, but it was getting dark. “I’ll mow first thing in the morning,” I promised my wife. “After the dew is off. Probably around 1 or 2, but definitely by 3.”

“Gonna do it right after supper,” I told my wife the next day. But then I noticed that the left front tire was low on air. The hardware store was closed, so I couldn’t buy a bicycle pump. I hated to put off the job another day, but it couldn’t be helped.

The next day was Sunday, which I try to keep holy by not working.

I filled the tire on Monday, which was when I noticed all the sticks that had fallen in the yard over the winter. “Need to pick up those sticks first,” I told my wife. “Can’t be chopping up all those sticks. One guy ran over a stick with his mower, and it flew out the side and killed a kid. I read about it just last week.”

I went inside to find the article to show it to my wife. It took several hours, but I finally found it. I hadn’t remembered it correctly. It was a dog, not a kid. And it had been hit by a car. Still, it is best to err on the side of safety, so I picked up the sticks the next day.

It is a good thing I did, too, because while I was out in the yard, I discovered a wet spot by the corner.

“I think the sump pump discharge pipe is cracked,” I told my wife that night. “I’ll have to dig it up tomorrow and replace it.”

It wasn’t the discharge pipe, after all. It was the water pipe leading to my house. The town had to come fix it after I cracked it with my pickax. The job took three days, and they tore up most of my lawn, which I plan to reseed just as soon as my neighbor has a free moment to help me. The irony of this is not lost on me. Had I mowed the yard, all that effort would have been wasted. It is almost enough to make me believe in a benevolent God.


Visit Philip Gulley's Personal Website here.