I’ve gone back and forth on lawn mowing over the years. It’s hard.
I’ve always enjoyed mowing and grooming my yard. And every time I’ve given it up in favor of hiring someone else to do it, I still enjoy my crop of good mowing memories.
I mowed two yards as a kid — our yard on Redbud Street in Mount Pleasant and my grandparents’ on Cypress Street in Pittsburg. Ours was a chore to earn an allowance—a necessity. But mowing the grass at my grandparents’ house? Now that was fun.
Funny how grandparents have a knack for always making the worst task seem like a blast.
Granddad’s lawn mower was an old Sears, Roebuck and Co. reel-type, early selfpropelled power mower, the only one of its kind I recall seeing. The green mower with big yellow wheels and a wooden roller trailing the blade personified my grandfather. Both were outdated— even then. But both were hard-working and reliable to a fault.
One pull of the rope wrapped around the cranking hub on the old mower, and it came to life. Releasing the handle- mounted lever set the mower in motion, moving slowly around the yard and doing the job it was designed to do.
At home, mowing the grass was just one of many chores on the list that earned me a lofty allowance of 25 cents a week. It doesn’t sound like much today, but that quarter bought my way into the Saturday matinee at the Martin theater, plus a Coke and popcorn.
Chores in general never excited me much; I was in it for the money. And soon after making the connection between working and income, I figured out the shortest route to get a raise from that quarter a week was a summer job.
To increase my standard of living beyond the two-bit allowance, I started mowing yards. For at least a couple of summers, keeping yards around south-side Mount Pleasant neighborhoods neatly cut for $3 a pop not only raised my standard of living, but transformed my pocket money from the rattling kind to the folding kind—converting green grass to green in my pockets.
Thinking about lawn mowing also reminds me of how many lawn mowers I’ve owned over the years. I don’t have a number, but I always remember my first one. Not quite up there with my first car or first date, but a vivid memory no less.
It was also from Sears, yellow and it easily trimmed the thick carpet of San Augustine grass surrounding my first house on Dogwood Street in Mount Pleasant. It turned a chore into a labor of love.
Admiring the sight and smell of the newly mowed grass, I felt the pride my parents preached about a nicelooking yard.
And all that time, I thought it was a punishment.
Looking back now, I remember my dad trying to explain that theory long before I was old enough to understand it.
“Dad,” I asked once, “why do parents punish their kids by making them mow the grass?”
“It’s not punishment, son,” he said. “It teaches the value of working to earn money. And about pride in what you do; being proud of how nice your yard looks.” “I’d be prouder if you mowed it,” I remember telling him.
“You’ll understand someday,” he said. “For now, let me see if I can better explain this. Remember that it’s your mother who is teaching pride in a job well done by authorizing me to pay your allowance for mowing her yard.”
So, once more, I’ve canceled my lawn service this summer, retrieved the lawn mower from retirement in the storeroom, and returned both of us to active duty.
I’m remembering the pride in a nicely mowed yard, and about good people wanting to spend time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. And wondering … Does this mean I have to get a dog now?
