A Bad Haircut

Today was a fairly relaxed day (aren't they all in the off-season?). Slept in a little, continued the church shopping (Pentecostal, Methodist, and Baptist so far!), watched a little internet-tele, and then Jack and I decided, come half past one, that it was time to get to work. Now, yesterday we (mostly Jack, I think) started to hardcore tackle that shack-in-the-back: sweeping, decobwebbing, vacuuming, and the like for a few hours until it looked significantly better and we lost our get-go. So today we decided to get back to it, only I had been in the shack about five minutes when I saw Jack standing at the back porch trying to get the blades to whorl on our reel mower.

That's right: we bought a new reel mower. Now, is a reel mower a real mower? you might ask. The jury is still out on that one. A lot of reviews I read said that the reel mowers don't work very well when the grass is wet. Well, up here we've got about a 1 in 50 chance of being able to mow truly dry grass, so that's out of the question. We had one dry day yesterday and another today, so he figured we may as well give it a go today. He made a few uncertain passes right in front of the back porch before I stole it and wheeled it around to the front yard, fixing to start mowing the lawn from the beginning. The grass was thick and damp, but I managed to get a few short rows mowed. More or less. Jack took over and told me I ought to run to the store real quick and buy us a rake for the clippings. When I came back, he'd switched to long rows and had managed a few passes. We started switching back and forth between the raking and the mowing, and eventually, just as it was getting to be time for the daily sunset, we had the whole thing mowed.

Or did we? Jack made a couple swipes over some rows I had already raked. "Didn't you get those already?" I asked. "I don't know, I think they maybe got missed the first time." Didn't they all? We look around at our pell-mell lawn. Damp clusters of clippings are piled up like little graves over our contoured, mushy lawn. The grass, weeds, and what looks like wild parsley that we plowed through are as unruly as ever. Maybe about 85% of it is shorter than it was. The mower, which was shiny metal and a few plastic do-dads when I put it together out of the box on Friday, looks like some sort of shaggy art piece, plastered from handle to hobnail with smearings of grass. Pelouse mâché. Jack took a hose to it. It'll be my job to remember to stow it in the shack before we go to bed.

Tomorrow, assuming it doesn't rain, we'll finish moving our clippings piles to the back of the lot (I've been chucking them over the prickly vines that are covering the ground back there) and give it another go. Maybe lower the cutting height a notch or two. For now, our lawn is mowed, by the sweat of our brows, but it sure is a bad haircut!

Until next time!