Pearl River      Mowing your yard doesn’t necessarily rank near the top of anyone’s list of top ten favorite ways to spend their time.  It’s a chore, especially in the South where it seems the grass is always growing, and if it’s not grass, it’s some greenish form of weeds or unnamed plant life.  Add to the degree of difficulty, particularly in the Gulf Coast and New Orleans climate, where the heat and humidity might be great for the grass, that combination can kick the mower’s butt pretty hard.

I thought of all this reading an article in the Wall Street Journal making the claim that this was now a competitive status symbol for some variety of white collar, well-paid men seeking the holy grail of the prefect lawn.  If this is a fad, it hasn’t come to my neighborhood yet.  Maybe this is a suburban or East Coast thing or simply from another planet.  My first job at 13 with my brother, as I’ve often reported, was hiring out with my dad’s power mower and edger to neighbors and vacationers who wouldn’t or couldn’t mow their own yards.  If they have money, aren’t they hiring landscapers or yard men?  The article has an answer:

“… there’s a hidden financial flex. Hiring landscapers can achieve the same aesthetic and flash disposable income. But a trendy personal-finance axiom is that there are three levels of wealth: mowing your own lawn, paying someone else to do it, then…mowing your own lawn.”

Really?  Is this what’s happening?

I’m not sure.  I’ve always mowed my own yard, as my father did before me, religiously.  He came by it honestly.  His father and untold generations before him in Germany were farmers of one sort or another there or in eastern Russia.  My grandfather’s name was Erdman, which means “man of the soil” in German.  My mother was a garden clubber and a horticultural judge at general and specialized flower shows, and my father did the work regularly and steadfastly into his 80’s to make it work for them.  When I would mow their yard, I have to admit, it was “in the blood.”  It’s impossible not to think of the number of times you are simply following your father footsteps as you pushed the mower or tried to manage the heavy automatic, self-driven one he got later in his life until it was too much for him.  Our own yard in New Orleans is a postage stamp affair, and that’s a good thing.  It’s a long way from perfect, and I can do the whole job in 15 minutes, which suits me fine.

There’s another side to this though.  The Journal reporter reached out for Ohio’s former US House Speaker John Boehner, long retired and pushed out of that job in an earlier version of that cantankerous outfit.  Boehner tells something of a secret,

…he explained, … that mowing the lawn is a cover story. What looks to others like a chore is actually a refuge from screens, co-workers, children and everything else that demands mental energy. “Think of this as taking time for yourself,” Boehner advised. “Now, you don’t want to tell anybody that, all right? They might not let you do it if they think you’re enjoying it. Cutting the grass will be the smallest of the benefits. You’ll get a lot more out of taking your time and forgetting about all kinds of things. It’s healthy for you.”

I’m surprised to find that I would agree with Boehner about anything, but he’s not wrong about this.

There’s something that these guys are not saying, and that has to do with riding mowers and what are called “zero turns.”  Sitting on one or the other, with cans on your ears, is different than shoving and grinding through high grass with a push mower, blades or gas.   Without having the discussion, I can tell my son and I agree on this score.  It’s fun to handle a zero turn at our camp.  It’s like driving a motorcycle off the highway without fear of other cars coming at you.  Spending an hour or more mowing these big machines requires total focus and concentration, dodging roots and rocks, but it’s weirdly mentally refreshing, even if exhausting and real labor.  Plus, when you look at the job when it’s over, it’s not perfect, but it’s beautiful in its own way, and very satisfying, despite like Sisyphus knowing that you will do this all over again soon, as will your sons and daughters or others as long, as the ground lies still and the grass grows again and again until time or the climate stops the cycle.