Well it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon…sorry… almost every time I sit down to write my weekly blog that line runs through my head. So no I do not live nor was I born in a fictitious Minnesotan town. I grew up in Queens, New York. So did a few million other people so that might not be that special, but this is my blog and it’s my warped prospective of the universe that counts here, so deal with it.
My wife and I have had a bit of company the past couple of weeks so there has been lots of chatting. Inevitably I end up digging up some old stories from my childhood. Just today I was talking about the lawn at the new house and comparing it to what I grew up with. As a little kid my four older siblings got to mow while I always had to rake or sweep. There is no fun in raking. As a matter of fact, compared to the glory and splendor of mowing I might as well have been sweeping up the poop in a circus parade while they rode the exotic animals through the big top. To this day I despise raking.
With each year that passed I thought maybe it would be my time to advance up the family grunt-chore ladder and get to shine as the man behind the mower but alas once enough older siblings had left the nest, my folks and I moved to a condo in Florida and I never got my chance to be the mow-master. This story gets me a lot more pity until people see how small the lawns are in Queens New York. The kitchen in my new house is bigger then the lawn that I bemoan having to tragically rake. I recall some friends from high school in Florida traveling to New York with me years later and upon seeing the miniscule front lawn and tinier concrete backyard they blurted “is this postage stamp of green what you complained about for all these years?”
The deep childhood scaring caused by the whole raking calamity and the fact that I am a city boy at heart have made me less then excited about spring in the new house. The lawn here feels as big as the Ponderosa compared to where I grew up. Every other house I have lived in has either had a lawn service or was someone else’s responsibility. Before we moved in my wife and I discussed getting a lawn service but after we moved in she suggested we give it a shot ourselves. I hope by August our neighbors are not referring to us as ‘the jungle house’. I agreed to try but only if I got to be the official mower and she take care of the detail stuff (like raking, sweeping and edging) that remind me too much of my childhood hardship.
Once the new sod started to turn green, we purchased a fancy new somewhat eco-friendly grossly overpriced Cordless Electric Mower (I still have to make some modifications to it like adding the cocktail glass sized cup holder). I did some reading about what height the grass should be before it’s virgin mowing. Sunday I announced that I was going out to ‘measure the lawn’ but the only parts long enough to mow were the increasingly dense weeds that seem intent on overpowering our stubbly green grass nubs.
My wife and her visiting sister decided to do their best to eradicate our back yard of the pesky weeds. After ripping out several zillion in just a small area of what must have felt like the ‘back forty’, they shifted to a technique called ‘Zen gardening’ which I believe consisted of sitting in the only shady patch and plucking whatever happens to be in arms reach.
My wife seemed to be a bit frustrated with our weed to grass ratio so I told her a story about my friend Allyson’s battle with squirrels. She spent hundreds of dollars on various complex designed bird feeders and baffles in an unsuccessful effort to keep the persistent squirrels out of the birdseed. I suggested the simpler less expensive solution of just calling it a ‘squirrel and bird feeder’. My wife quickly connected the dots and told me we were not going to have a ‘weed garden’. “But you don’t have to rake weeds” I replied.
So I am the mowing and my wife is in charge of the detail stuff. I feel good about my mowing position but I think she got the easy end of the deal. Sometime since I was a kid it was decided that grass clippings are no longer called ‘trash’ and are now called ‘mulch’. I assume some other kid came up with this idea in an effort to get out of raking up the mess and it somehow stuck. Now it is recommended to just leave the mess all over the lawn. No more raking up the clippings and junk; all the mowers now have an attachable clippings bag. Pretty soon I will have to make the first pass with the mower and a new era of my life will begin.
My wife and I have had a bit of company the past couple of weeks so there has been lots of chatting. Inevitably I end up digging up some old stories from my childhood. Just today I was talking about the lawn at the new house and comparing it to what I grew up with. As a little kid my four older siblings got to mow while I always had to rake or sweep. There is no fun in raking. As a matter of fact, compared to the glory and splendor of mowing I might as well have been sweeping up the poop in a circus parade while they rode the exotic animals through the big top. To this day I despise raking.
With each year that passed I thought maybe it would be my time to advance up the family grunt-chore ladder and get to shine as the man behind the mower but alas once enough older siblings had left the nest, my folks and I moved to a condo in Florida and I never got my chance to be the mow-master. This story gets me a lot more pity until people see how small the lawns are in Queens New York. The kitchen in my new house is bigger then the lawn that I bemoan having to tragically rake. I recall some friends from high school in Florida traveling to New York with me years later and upon seeing the miniscule front lawn and tinier concrete backyard they blurted “is this postage stamp of green what you complained about for all these years?”
The deep childhood scaring caused by the whole raking calamity and the fact that I am a city boy at heart have made me less then excited about spring in the new house. The lawn here feels as big as the Ponderosa compared to where I grew up. Every other house I have lived in has either had a lawn service or was someone else’s responsibility. Before we moved in my wife and I discussed getting a lawn service but after we moved in she suggested we give it a shot ourselves. I hope by August our neighbors are not referring to us as ‘the jungle house’. I agreed to try but only if I got to be the official mower and she take care of the detail stuff (like raking, sweeping and edging) that remind me too much of my childhood hardship.
Once the new sod started to turn green, we purchased a fancy new somewhat eco-friendly grossly overpriced Cordless Electric Mower (I still have to make some modifications to it like adding the cocktail glass sized cup holder). I did some reading about what height the grass should be before it’s virgin mowing. Sunday I announced that I was going out to ‘measure the lawn’ but the only parts long enough to mow were the increasingly dense weeds that seem intent on overpowering our stubbly green grass nubs.
My wife and her visiting sister decided to do their best to eradicate our back yard of the pesky weeds. After ripping out several zillion in just a small area of what must have felt like the ‘back forty’, they shifted to a technique called ‘Zen gardening’ which I believe consisted of sitting in the only shady patch and plucking whatever happens to be in arms reach.
My wife seemed to be a bit frustrated with our weed to grass ratio so I told her a story about my friend Allyson’s battle with squirrels. She spent hundreds of dollars on various complex designed bird feeders and baffles in an unsuccessful effort to keep the persistent squirrels out of the birdseed. I suggested the simpler less expensive solution of just calling it a ‘squirrel and bird feeder’. My wife quickly connected the dots and told me we were not going to have a ‘weed garden’. “But you don’t have to rake weeds” I replied.
So I am the mowing and my wife is in charge of the detail stuff. I feel good about my mowing position but I think she got the easy end of the deal. Sometime since I was a kid it was decided that grass clippings are no longer called ‘trash’ and are now called ‘mulch’. I assume some other kid came up with this idea in an effort to get out of raking up the mess and it somehow stuck. Now it is recommended to just leave the mess all over the lawn. No more raking up the clippings and junk; all the mowers now have an attachable clippings bag. Pretty soon I will have to make the first pass with the mower and a new era of my life will begin.
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