SAGE ADVICE: Lawn moaning

By MARK SAGE/Staff

My annual battle with the grass is under way.
Just a day or so ago I waded through embarrassingly high, hip high in places, grass, alternately pushing and dragging a mower. In fairness to me, I had mowed the half acre immediately around the house. So this wasn’t my first time on the lawn. It was, however, the first time that really counted, the first time I mowed everything, or nearly everything, I’ve got to mow.
Why it’s the middle of May, you say, how can the battle just be starting? I’m lazy. Rainy weekends. Gas prices make it uneconomical to keep a clipped lawn. Then there’s baseball. When we’re not at a game or practicing, we’re playing in the hip-high weeds. Boy Scouts. And hiking. I almost forgot hiking. My boys have a newfound love of anything that carries them afoot deep into the woods with bottles of water, packs of snack crackers and me. Take your pick from the convenient excuses.
The thing is I actually enjoy cutting the grass, provided there’s enough time to cut the grass. I like the feeling of looking back over the yard, all freshly manicured. I like starting something that has a finish line. I like the smell. But there are other things I like better. Gardening is one. Every blade of grass I’m chopping down with a push mower is a weed I’m not scraping out with a hoe, a pea I’m not training to a strand of twine, a tomato that won’t be harvested in late summer. Hiking is another. In a few years, my sons aren’t going to need me to go into the woods with them. They won’t be afraid anymore that they might not be able to find the way home without the old man. They won’t need me to find them walking sticks and carry the bottles of water and packs of snack crackers. Then there’s baseball. It might be the only reason I bother mowing at all. To play the game properly you need a low carpet of grass, something that lets grounders zing but not so much that a bad hop will take the head off a 4-year-old. And to play the game properly you just can’t be spending all the daylight hours behind some noisy engine tied to whirring blades. Ah, there’s the old Catch-22. To play ball, you’ve got to have a well-maintained or at least reasonably maintained yard. And to have a reasonably maintained yard you have to forgo the whole baseball playing thing. Were I Washington County News columnist Carl Clarke, I’d invent shoes with tiny blades on each cleat, which would allow me to mow as I played, hiked or did other not-behind-the-push-mower type things in the yard. Alas, I’m not Carl Clarke, so I’m stuck making choices, tough choices, breaking down and beginning the battle with the grass in mid- to late-May, looking for balls that were lost, grounders that didn’t quite zing at all, as I go. I know I’ve found them by the ka-thunk.
I’m not entirely happy with the bargain. Mowing is a several day long affair, or a whole Saturday if it’s not raining. That’s a lot of missed time at the plate, a lot of snack crackers not eaten, a lot of weeds growing side by side with the peas.
I know that one day I’ll look forward to the weekly mowing chore. It’ll be a vacation from whatever’s going on in my life after they’ve tired of helping harvest peas, when baseball is something they did before friends and girls took center stage, when they don’t need the old man to find the way home from the deep woods. I’m willing to wait for that time. Unfortunately, the grass isn’t.