Monday, April 02, 2018

Compulsion

It makes complete sense that I would spend the first couple of hours of my Spring Break doing what makes my mother laugh: I worked. Not at the job from which I was taking the aforementioned break. I repaired my electric lawn mower. Once that was done, I did exactly what came naturally after that. I mowed the lawn.
The combination of a March that dropped a good deal of rain into a spring that had been drier than most of us had hoped for and a few weeks waiting for a part that had to be researched, ordered, and replaced gave us a pretty wild mess of a yard. It was the kind of green sea that my wife has pined for since we have lived on our little patch of land. I don't do well when I see a lawn that is less than manicured. This is probably because I have been cutting grass for as many years as I care to remember. Lugging my family's lawnmower to the trailer park where my piano teacher lived to trim the tiny plots of barely lawns for a great many elderly clients was how I made my first fortune. The one that helped me buy my water bed. And helped pay for my first speeding ticket.
You could say that I've got lawn mowing in my blood.
Or you could say that I have an unnatural compulsion to see all those green blades cut to a nice level plane. And you could say that I don't know how to relax. Both of these assertions would be accurate. You could also say that I build my self-esteem by attempting to master nature.
Attempting.
Because I know that this is a passing thing. The grass is going to continue to grow. And the bridge rectifier I replaced might very well need replacing again at some point. That's why I bought two. I sort of expected that I would fail miserably in my first attempt and therefore I purchased a backup so that I could still appear clever in the face of the encroaching emerald wave.
But I got lucky the first time. I fixed the mower and I was back to work.
Wait a second.
I could have set that package of bridge rectifiers aside and let the grass grow. I could be on vacation. I could relax.
After the lawn was mowed.

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