I hate mowing

It's before noon and I'm having an unusually early beer because I'm cooling off from one of my least favorite jobs - mowing the lawn.
My distaste for yardwork was a point of sharp disagreement in my first marriage and a strong factor in my choosing apartment and condo life after my divorce. I admire a nicely kept yard as much as the next guy. I just don't want to waste my time and sweat on it.
The condo where I lived a couple of years before getting married and moving to my present home had a little garden area by the front door. The previous owner had some flowers and other plantings there, which I ignored and neglected to the point that I became embarrassed by the space. I finally began telling people I was developing a wildlife refuge outside my front door.
During my early childhood, we lived in a small house with a small yard that my dad cut with a hand-powered reel-style mower. My son Sean said he uses one at his place in Portland, Ore., and I had a momemt of nostalgic reverie over it.
When my parents bought a new home in the spring of 1954 with a larger yard, Dad invested in a power mower. I think it was a Lawson. It was one of the few mechanical things he chose to work on himself, and that consisted just of sharpening the blade and changing the oil.
It was during one of those oil changes that he lost his Masonic ring when it slipped unnoticed off of his oil-slick finger into the grass. It turned up a couple of seasons later and he wore it for the rest of his life. Now it's in a little funeral home bag of his personal effects sitting on my dresser.
But I digress.
After the novelty of a power mower wore off, Dad decided I deserved a turn at mowing the lawn.
I thought this was a heady responsibility and great fun for a month or so.
Then I began to develop the attitude that persists to this day.
I don't recall whether I picked it up from Dad or developed it spontaneously, but I mow a lawn in a decreasing radius spiral, rather than the back-and-forth straight row method. It just seemed more efficient to turn a corner rather than do a 180-degree turn after every pass.
I do the first couple of circuits in a clockwise direction, so as to blow the clippings toward the center of the lawn rather than into my neighbor's yard. Then, I change to counter-clockwise, so I don't keep chopping up the same bunch of clippings. It also avoids a build-up of clippings in the center of the yard when I'm done.
The contours of our back yard when I was a kid result in a patch of grass - in the last few circuits - that resembles the shape of Itasca County, Minnesota. We went there on a vacation the summer between my seventh- and eighth-grade years and the map stuck in my mind and transferred to the process of mowing.
Most of my lawnmowing time as a teenager was spent thinking about girlfriends - past, present and hoped-for.
These days, I lose myself in music with an iPod and custom molded earplug stereo speakers that I mostly use for long distance motorcycle trips. It saves my hearing from the racket of the mower and give me a random sampling of more than 3,600 songs.
I envy the guy down the street who has most of his acreage in wild prairie grass and actually gets a property tax break for it.
Unfortunately, I am surrounded by neighbors whose lawns make mine look bad.
They're both named Mike and they both have riding mowers. Mike to the north has a Dixie Chopper that can probably attain speeds up to 35 mph. His son takes about 5 minutes to mow their lawn, which is more than twice the size of mine.
Mike to the south seems to see his lawn as a hobby and keeps it meticulously manicured.
I can't hope to keep up with either of them. I just pray for drought and get out the lawnmower when I can't stand the embarrassment any more.
I bought a new mower last year after a wheel fell off of the one Maria had from her previous home. I had the good sense to put fuel stabilizer in the gas tank last fall, so it started right up this spring.
I've used it maybe four times this year.
I'd hoped to get out before the heat of the day this morning, but in doing so I found myself bogged down in tall, wet grass that stopped the machine in its tracks.
I set the wheels up a notch, scraped the accumulated grass out from under the blade and got it done, but not before I'd sweated about a gallon.
So that beer tastes pretty damned good.