I suppose I was about 10 years old when my dad decided I should mow the grass. We didn’t have very big yard on Jennings Street, in Beckley WV, but we also didn’t have a very good lawnmower. It was a push mower, a manual push mower, meaning you did all the pushing and if you went fast enough, the blades would rotate and maybe cut the grass. Or maybe not. It probably didn’t help that the blades on our mower were as dull as Bernie Sanders at a banking convention. That thing was a beast to push.
Naturally, each week I put off mowing as long as I could, which made matters worse as the grass grew higher and higher and became even more difficult to cut. It was brutally exhausting for a 50-pound boy to have to push a lawnmower with dull blades that weighed more than I did through a stand of thick grass.
Yet, to earn my 10-cent weekly allowance and to be able to play a pick-up game of baseball on Saturday morning with Freddie Arnold, that was my job. It was during this time in my life that I learned how to really piss and moan. But it did no good. I still had to push that stupid mower.
When we moved to Lewisburg, WV, Mom and Dad bought a house with a bigger lot, meaning more grass. It was about an acre lot, which would have taken me two months to cut even a single time with the old manual mower. It was obvious that I would need a new-fangled gasoline mower, so Daddy bought one, the cheapest one he could find. The reason some lawnmowers are cheap, I came to understand, is because they are not built very well and will more or less cease to function after about a month. Now, with an acre of grass to mow, I used all my energy not to push a manual mower, but rather to crank and crank a gasoline mower in an effort to fire the thing up. That lawnmower was truly an instrument of the devil. It worked when it was good and damned ready and not a minute before.
After a couple years at the one-acre lot, we moved to a brand new house with two acres of land. Fortunately, at least at first, there was no grass whatsoever. It was just a big field of broom straw. But guess who had to get out and dig up the hayfield and plant grass seed? It was like having to wire your own electric chair – cruel and unusual punishment, for sure. The grass ultimately grew on the half-acre that we planted, and then Daddy decided we (meaning me) should mow the other acre and a half of broom straw – which was approximately waist high. This meant I would push the mower all of 5 feet before it conked out and flooded, and I would have to wait a half-hour to mow another five feet of grass.
I spent most of that summer tying to manually mow the acre and half hayfield and by the time I finished, the first part had grown as tall as ever.
The year I went to college, Daddy bought a riding mower. It was a top of the line John Deere. Ran like a top and started with the turn of a key. My younger brothers fought each other to be able to ride it and have mowing privileges.
When it comes to mowing grass, Boomers know that sometimes life is not fair!