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For me, the experience was a glorious fulfillment. 12 years of apartment living hate convinced me that you ain't no kind of man unless you have stairs, but I wanted more than stairs. I wanted land. When I moved to the burbs, I got a little patch of paradise with a three-story house, a picket fence, a swing set of small frontier outposts, and two separate addicts, one for storm Christmas decorations and baby paraphernalia, the other for hiding several thousand comic books that my wife graciously pretends not to know about.
More important, I got 9,000 square feet, give or take, of land. This land is my land. I love this land. It is slowly killing me.
When we first moved in, the grass around the house, a tall fescue, was a lush carpet. The prior owners were a middle-aged couple whose children had grown. The husband spent a good bit of his time dividend on the lawn, fussing over his grass to the point where he would come running out of the house to yell at neighborhood children who strayed across it. He was, literally, the old man telling kids to get off his lawn.
I resolved to preserve his work without being quite so militant. I applied seasonal treatments at exactly the prescribed intervals. I overceded twice a year and core aerated in the fall. When crabgrass and dandelions made incursions around the perimeter, I was waiting for the chemical spray and a waiting trail.
There was nothing I wouldn't do for my lawn, except know it. I liked most outdoor work. One summer my son and I built a raised garden along the southern side of the house. It evolved to 2,200 pounds of stone.
After the first attempt, we found that we hadn't grated the ground properly and the retaining wall was two inches off level. We happily took the whole thing apart and re-grated it. The next year, our big project was planting four large trees, two cherries, a red bud, and a red maple. These were exciting tasks.
But for me, mowing falls into the sour spot of chores that are too repetitive to be interesting, but too demanding to be mentally liberating. It's the outdoor equivalent of folding laundry. So, I found a neighborhood kid to mow my lawn for me. I got lucky with Garrett.
An enterprising kid, he had already built a substantial lawn care business when I met him as a high schooler. When he went off to Virginia Tech to major in landscape architecture, he kept the business going in the summers. And when he graduated and moved away, he passed the business on to another kid in the neighborhood, Cody. He was great too.
But then Cody went off to Virginia Tech as well. When I waved goodbye to Cody, I realized that all the other kids in our neighborhood are girls, which was great for babysitting, but not for lawn-owning. Reluctantly, I called him the professionals. As it turns out, I did not enjoy having my lawn mowed by professionals.
They were efficient, but much less careful than Garrett and Cody had been. The kids did a better job, hands down. Besides, I got the impression that the gentleman from the lawn service who did the actual mowing were of questionable legal status, which suggested that they were probably being paid a very small fraction of what I was paying their company, which made me uncomfortable. So, this year, I finally bought a miller of my own.
I've made my piece with it, more or less. For one thing, my grass isn't so green anymore. When we moved in, we had only one child and he could barely walk, which meant that I had lots of time to tend the lawn, coating up chemicals and removing one by one every invasive intruder. Now I have three kids who are always outside, and they and their friends spend hours every day trampling the grass.
I regularly catch them digging holes in the turf for no discernible reason except, as my son explains, to conduct experiments. I can't tell them to get off my lawn. My weekends are busier now, too. The prospect of finding time to push a mower across my once-beautiful grass is depressing.
I take heart, though, and then I'll let my oldest is already seven, so I figure it's only six years, maybe 90 mowing's total, until I can pay him to take over the lawn.