Whackin' the Grass

We have a tiny "postage stamp" front lawn here at the new digs, and last summer, in a fit of well-meaning greenness, we bought a cheap-o manual mower: you know, the old-fashioned kind where the easy rolling of the wheels spins a whirling, razor-sharp blade that slices and dices grass and weeds into instant mulch. The kind that makes you feel good (and not just virtuously nostalgic, mind you) just thinking about it.

Unfortunately, having bought the cheap-o edition, this mower now happily slides across the lawn, pretty much no matter how or where I push it, and both the wheels and the razor sharp blades resist turning at all. (It works well enough as I push it along the empty sidewalk, to give it its due.) So that mower now has a special place in the garage--the place of all stuff that is simply waiting for the next garage sale. As a result, I've taken to mowing our entire lawn with an electric "string trimmer": that is, an electric "weed whacker," which I plug in in our living room, believe it or not.

Oddly, this device seems to do the job well: I sweep it back and forth over the lawn, as if I were a metal detectorist searching for buried treasure, and I get the same kind of chronic back pain as well, I suspect (a somewhat different kind than I got from the push mower). Soon, I think, I'll have the whole routine perfected, with the crowning glory being the fact that I'll probably need to adopt some protective eye goggles. That should be a look.