Mowing grass a waiting game (5/4/05)

It looks as if I won't be needing a scythe.

Thanks to Sunday's sunshine, I was finally able to mow the lawn, a fact which should give our neighbors — who have been much better about mowing this spring than I — some comfort.

But it almost didn't happen.

Our old lawn mower has been on its last legs. It had been a great mower, a Lawnboy that I bought from Wayne Imel years ago. And while Wayne was alive, any problems were solved pretty quickly.

Last summer, however, the machine was apparently overtaken by some sort of small engine demon. It roared out of control, overheated quickly, and resisted numerous attempts at repair.

With Wayne gone and the machine having given us its all for more years than I'd like to admit, we came to the obvious conclusion that a replacement was in order.

Actually, my wife and youngest daughter came to that conclusion long ago. But as long as I was doing the mowing, they weren't going to press the issue.

This month, however, with another overseas assignment looming a few weeks down the road for me, that meant they were going to have to mow. There was some pressure to come up with a better solution. As in, spend some money and buy a new mower.

That was a pretty straightforward process.

But then there was the matter of putting it together.

On the showroom floor, mowers all look beautiful. But you tend to forget that the thing is coming home in a box.

In fact, so faulty was my memory that I asked to have the mower delivered, picturing it showroom fresh and ready to go.

I needn't have bothered. The box that Don Enyart of Community Home Improvement dropped off would have fit in the back of my wife's Jeep.

If Don recognized my disappointment that the machine wasn't fully assembled, he didn't show it. Instead, he remembered mowing our yard when he was a kid and Lou and Eula Wasmuth lived where we live today.

Like most folks, we had caught the spring fever bug early during that spate of wonderful weather a few weeks back. That was mower-buying weather if there is such a thing.

But within minutes of the arrival of the boxed mower at our house, the weather turned cold. To be precise, it turned nasty.

The box sat on the patio, opened and examined, with the instruction manuals removed and read, but with the machine not ready yet to run.

And days passed. And the grass grew taller.

Violets appeared in our front yard in abundance one morning. A few days later, when I came home at noon, the same space was full of dandelions.

Later still and a crop of spring beauties had popped up.

It was colorful, but it wasn't much of a front lawn.

Procrastination wasn't the problem; the weather was. Every night I'd come home just as the rain started to fall. Just as it appeared as if things might dry out, there'd be another cloudburst turning low spots into puddles.

And the days passed. And the grass grew taller.

It grew especially tall where our dog — and visiting dogs — had been fertilizing. The effect was a bit like a bad haircut.

Finally, on Thursday, I'd had enough. Though it was still too wet to mow and it was still cold, I did the minimal amounts of assembly required, putting on the wheels, hooking up the starter pull, and adjusting the handle. I was ready to mow, but the weather still wasn't ready to cooperate.

On Sunday, however, the sun came out.

Sure, it was still chilly. I felt as if I should be wearing gloves when I hauled the new machine out of the garage.

But for the first time on a weekend afternoon since the new mower had been delivered, it was OK to mow.

The dandelions are still there. The violets are still there. And the spring beauties are still there.

But at least they're shorter than they were before.[[In-content Ad]]