Mind Over Mowing

I just finished mowing the spacious lawns of the Waggoner Estate. It takes me approximately 25 minutes to mow and weedeat our lawn. We do have a larger than usual lawn for our area. We also have 6 mature trees on our property, so I do quite a bit of weed-whacking as well.

When I saw this picture, my mind was instantly transported back across the vast expanse of time (15 years, to be exact) to the days of mowing the Waggoner field. To those of you who visited the old homestead in the grand village of Frankfort, Indiana, you will most likely remember the cornfield that occupied the lot to the left of the house (perspective: viewing 2107 W. Green St. from the street itself). My father purchased the nearly 1-acre lot sometime during those formative years where character is supposed to be learned and practiced. It was a great place for the occasional neighborhood baseball game and go-cart track, but it lost it's allure come mowing time.

You see, we owned two lawn mowers: one was the old-fashioned push mower without a motor possessing the rustiest blades this side of a Kentucky junkyard; the other was a motorized push mower. This mower did not have the little switch that you shove down to engage the automatic walk-behind feature that so many do today. No, remember we were learning character. This mower was engaged by you placing your hands on the handlebar and with all of the power generated by your skinny little arms, pushed across the field. My brother and I had more character than any other kid in the area.

My brother and I had more fights over who's turn it was to mow the lawn. Bobby can set me straight, but I don't ever recall my Dad using the push mower on the field. Nope, this was good for us. "The discipline will pay off in the future", he would often tell us, following that line up with, "If you can't get a little yard like this mowed, you'll never amount to a hill of beans." Bobby and I, not being quite sure what the euphemism "hill of beans" referred to, but being pretty sure we didn't want to become one, would trundle off to the garage and frantically pull the starter cord approximately 29 times until the little 1.5 hp engine sputtered to life. We then would walk behind the mower, accumulating enough mileage to qualify for a roundtrip to Sweden and back, flying Delta.

The entire time we were muttering unmentionable words under our breath vowing to never make our kids endure this kind of torturous routine. I don't exaggerate a bit when I tell you that at the end of our mowing our hands would freeze into a semi-clutched grasp. We would literally have to pry our fingers off of the handlebar. For the next 30 minutes we walked around looking like some type of unusual stroke victim. Parental abuse we called it.

I still remember the day Dad bought the John Deere riding mower. It was brand-new, beautiful, shiny and had a mowing deck that covered 3 times as much territory at a drive-by than our midget mower. Bobby and I went out to meet Dad and the new mower, this time pretty excited about the possibility of mowing the yard. HA! Dad wouldn't let us on the mower. He said, "Guys, I'm afraid you'll mess this up. I'll do it myself." I never rode that mower. I graduated from high school and headed off to college, never having the opportunity to sit on the yellow seat. So much for character!

The years have passed. I have a boy, I have a yard, I have a push-mower (albeit one of those fancy automatic ones). For some reason the concept of kids mowing the yard being abusive is beginning to fade into the mist of yesterday. In fact, as you see in one of the pictures above I'm already training Trey.

I told him that it builds character.