Shinn the Writer

Full Cycle

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“What’s that sound I hear? I think it’s the grass growing.”

 

The sound I heard wasn’t the grass growing. It was my dad’s not-so-subtle way of reminding that my least favorite chore was still to be done. I hated mowing the lawn. What a horrible way to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I don’t remember ever timing it, but it was probably about a two-hour job. Lawns are bigger in Michigan than they are in California. Thank heavens they were covered with snow four months out of the year.

 

I went to college less than an hour’s drive from home, so I was available to cut the grass long after my father died. I was thankful that my mother eventually moved to a smaller house with a smaller yard. When I went to graduate school, my drive home was closer to two hours, but every other week was enough. Eventually, that house became mine and my cutting the grass became less a family responsibility and more just a rite of home ownership.

 

I still hated it.

 

In 1980, I moved from the ‘burbs of Detroit to a burb in California, and soon realized an advantage of paying more money for less house, i.e. less yard. I actually took an area of about 200 square feet of dirt and planted grass. 

 

But I was only in Salinas for a little more than a year before I was offered a promotion to a job in San Francisco. Once again, I paid more for less. Even after removing the hedge that separated my lawn from the sidewalk, cutting the grass in front was a fifteen-minute job. One of the big selling points of the house was the huge deck in back, covering virtually all of what would otherwise be a sizeable (though hardly Michigan sizeable) back lawn. When I downsized the deck, I covered the newly exposed area with shrubs and a flagstone walkway. Smart.

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In a burst of environmentalist enthusiasm, I got rid of my gasoline-powered lawn mower and replaced it with an electric plug-in model. This turned out to be not-so-smart. Just dealing with the cord tripled the time spent doing the lawn. What is it about electric cords that you just can’t roll them up without their kinking and turning into a messy pile of electrical spaghetti? Of course, once the cord was deployed, I spent considerable time moving it from place to place so as not to run over it. I’d managed to turn my fifteen-minute job into a minor nightmare of home ownership. 

 

I don’t remember the conversation I had with my next-door neighbor Tom a few years back, but it no doubt was initiated by me upon seeing someone cutting his lawn. I’d never really thought of throwing money at the problem. Tom is a contractor and one of the people who worked for him sourced a guy who came over once every two weeks to do his lawn. What an opportunity for everyone. Soon he was doing two lawns right next to each other, and making more money while Tom and I got a better deal than we could have gotten each using our own guy. My lawnmower sat idle, eventually going to Urban Ore which gave me nothing but the reclaimed space in my garage. Life isn’t always fair.