The Beginning of Mowing Season

Before we move on to today's post, take a few minutes to read this interesting article on Slate. It's entirely unrelated, but interesting.

I spent my four hours on the riding lawn mower yesterday. For some reason I tend to end up mowing on Sundays. Don't ask me why, but the Christian day of rest has always tended to be the Jacob's day of mowing, given that I'm usually too excited about not having to go to work on Saturday that I find it difficult to find motivation to do anything that I don't really enjoy. Part of the yard had not been mowed in a very, very long time given the torrential rains that regularly hit my odd little part of the world at the end of last summer and continued through the fall. A very large part of my yard is only now dry enough to bear the weight of a riding lawnmower. Oddly, this part of the yard, about 50 yards from the house, is surprisingly weed free and I had assumed that the saturated conditions meant that the grass just hadn't grown that well. Turns out I was wrong. The grass was plenty long. It just had grown at a bafflingly uniform rate. Too bad this section of the yard is the only part you can't see from the road. Of course this does mean that I could sell tickets to lawn-obsessed suburbanites who'd flock from Atlanta to pay for the privilege to see my beautiful grass until it received another heavy rain and returned to freshwater marsh. I could probably even market the desiccated corpses of the crawfish currently littering that part of the yard as a selling point. The crustaceans are the secret! Buy my secret-blend Crustacializer Lawn Nutrient!

I'd have to make sure to always refer to it as the "lawn" in my marketing campaign, though. Lawn sounds so much fancier than yard.

As for the rest of my yard, it's a mess, and I don't care. I'm not about to go through the expense, trouble, and mess of burning, aerating, composting, and reseeding my yard to return it to a uniform monoculture of green, living carpet. I'm using my green tendencies as an excuse to not even take the easier method of chemical weed and feed, although it's really that I'm lazy and don't care. I find it hard enough to get up the energy to walk out to the lawnmower shed to mow the grass and keep it at a height that keeps it unattractive to snakes. Why would you expect me to work on keeping the yard covered mostly in grass? I actually kind of like the fact that my yard has a smattering of yellow, blue, red, and purple mingling in with the green of the grass and other plant matter. It's so much more attractive than that solid slab of green you see in front of so many people's houses.

Besides, I think I've made my views on excessive visible signs of human occupation quite clear.