The simple pleasure of mowing the lawn

I started mowing lawns when I was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s, and I’ve loved cutting grass ever since. When I say that, my listener usually retorts, “Well, you can mow mine anytime.” But I’m not for hire anymore: I like mowing my own lawn and I like the way it looks afterward. Several acquaintances with new houses have put wood chips and shrubbery around their houses to avoid having to mow. A bad move, I say. A mowed lawn is trim and cool and feels great on bare feet. But the world of advertising – and the American imagination that responds to it – have led many of us down an expensive, grassy, primrose path.

My grandmother was the first to trust me with a power mower and to pay me for mowing her lawns. She had an old reel mower with a Briggs and Stratton four-cycle engine in the days before the rotary lawn-mower had been invented, and she had a lot of lawn. I’d gas up the engine and adjust the clearance between the spinning blades and the cutter bar so it would cut smoothly and make a nice clicking whir. Then I’d go around the front lawn, clipping close to the barberry hedge, trim the side hill and the croquet court near the big red oak, and finish up mowing the square garden with the grape arbor at one end. It took me a couple of hours.

I earned enough money mowing lawns to buy my first bicycle, a three-speed Raleigh with hand brakes, the snazziest model then available. After school I’d ride my bike to the Miricks’ house and pull the big old reel mower out of the shed, gas it up, wrap the cord around the starter shaft, pull, and off we would go. I’d mow around the house and the barn, and then trim close to the stones and fence posts with hand clippers. It was chilly riding back at dusk along the flat stretch past Chet Drury’s barn, past the Lahti farm, and finally up past my grandmother’s to my house.

I also mowed Mrs. Sigourney’s estate on Worcester Road. Mr. Machis was her gardener and he had the keys to the lawnmower shed where we’d meet on Saturday mornings at 7 o’clock. The gang-mower had two reel units out in front, and it mowed a huge swath of grass. First I’d cut the half-circle of front lawn with the long curve of maple trees bordering on the driveway, then maneuver carefully in the formal garden on the east side of the house where, on a clear day, you could see the Boston skyline. I’d pedal home exhausted on my Raleigh, first pushing the bike up the hill past the Caldwells and then zooming down Gregory Hill before pumping up the last rise past the Gendrons.

Nowadays I see “landscapers” with fancy new pickups pulling trailers full of mowers and trimmers and spreaders and de-thatchers and leaf-blowers and rakes and shovels and bags and lots of other secret inventions I don’t even know about yet. They, along with the purveyors of seed and lime and fertilizers for every conceivable lawn illness and season, have a great thing going. Don’t get me wrong. Some of my closest friends and relatives belong to this new breed called “landscaper,” but, in moments of truth, even they admit, just like sellers of fine wines, that it’s all a lot of hype. Some of the greenest lawns I know have never seen a lime-spreader, a bag of fertilizer or a bagging mower.

The bagging mower, in my opinion, is the height of the unnecessary. A lawn wants its trimmings deposited directly back on itself. It likes its trimmings; it feeds off them. Why pay someone to cart them off to the dump? Also, what we need to trim the bulging American belly is not the riding mower but the push rotary mower, and a human pusher to push it. Just a simple, non-mulching, non-bagging, person-propelled mower. Why ride the mower and then go inside to the exercise machine? Or drive to the Y? Leave those calories out on the lawn with the trimmings.

If you’re truly dedicated to taking off those pounds, you might find an old push reel mower at a yard sale. My friend at the local garage disagrees and says, “You’ll use yourself right up pushing that mower.” I know that it’s not the American way and I know that Home Depot and Wal-Mart, Toro and John Deere, and especially Scotts with its lawn foods for every mood and condition will hoot at me, but so be it. I like my unfed lawn and I like mowing it with a push mower. It reminds me of when I was kid, my first three-speed bike, and my other after-school job of apple-picking. Here in Maine it’s been a good season for apples and lawns. Maybe you’ll be able to get one more mowing in before the cold weather when the grass stops growing. Enjoy it.

Thomas Moore lives in Brooksville.