Few other activities offer as neatly contained and framed a challenge as a lawn.
Vicki Hastrich talks about the satisfaction that lawnmowing provides through completing of a definable task. But never mind, for you are doing something useful now as you turn the lawn from scruffy mat to smooth carpet. Once the course is set your mind can wander to other things other people, clever things you might have said if you’d been able to think of them at the time, braver things you might have done. Is it going to be circles or swirls or straight lines today? If so, dead straight, please. You plot your course with the care of a harbour pilot. The task itself demands little concentration, once you’ve established the cutting track to follow, and that takes some time. If you flood the motor, if the spark plug is dirty, if the blades are clogged with grass, if someone has borrowed the earmuffs, it’s not a good way to start a day.īut when the motor sings and you’re rolling across the lawn like a boat through the waves, and the smell of fresh-cut grass fills the morning air, and the controls you clutch respond to your lightest touch well, that’s about as good as it’s going to get today.Īnd with any luck, the mowing experience creates a kind of bubble to think inside. Once you have managed to start the mower that is. We’ll look at those themes as we go, all springing from something as ordinary as mowing the lawn.īut before we get too serious, let’s just acknowledge the pleasure that lawn mowing can bring. It would be over-egging it to say that wars have been fought over lawns, but they have certainly divided families and broken reputations, made fortunes for some and turned others into paupers, spawned ecological disasters, prompted revolutionary social reforms, measured us morally, inspired poets and woven great romance.
0 kommentar(er)
