Just like old times: cower in place 20

oday I got to do a job that had nothing to do with the coronavirus. We’re well into spring, with the new life appearing and buds budding and birds singing, blah, blah. For me, one of the harbingers of this fertile season is that the lawn starts to need mowing again.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like mowing the lawn, especially now I’m retired. I find it to be kind of like walking meditation. I bought one of those old-timey push mowers, which means that you can smell the grass when you cut it instead of gasolene, and you can hear the wind and birds around you instead of engine noise, or, if you feel like it, you can hear the inspirational audiobook you’ve plugged your head into.

But today is not the day for the push mower. Before the first mow of the season, the lawn is always pocked with overgrowths of grass and weeds. Some of these have grown into tufts a foot or more high. I suspect these are where a dog peed once, and ever after every dog who wandered by felt it must pee in the same place. For a lawn this feral, I had to break out the old electric mower. With luck, and if I am conscientious, maybe this will be the only time this season I have to use it.

I wore my respirator. Not a covid respirator, but my normal, Ace hardware-model dust and (more importantly) pollen-stopper. I have grass allergies that can get me to sneezing so bad I throw my back out, and even with the daily doses of Singulair, I dare not tackle a lawn mowing job without my respirator and a preventative dose of Benedryl on top. It makes me sleepy afterward, but what greater pleasure is there in summer than taking a nap after you cut the grass?

It was pleasantly cool and breezy today, and even with the power mower noise, it was a fun workout to tackle the growths that had invaded our yard since last fall. I think I did the job without thinking about coronavirus even once. What a vacation from the covid lockdown!

And the lawn looks so nice once it’s done. One of the things I like best about our new-mown lawn is that when it is cut short enough, the weeds (which make up at least 60% of our yard’s ecosystem) look just like the grass that I can never get to grow in their place.

I’ve finally thought of a good pen name! Long-time readers might recall my search (here) and (here) for a decent pen name, thwarted when I found that my brilliant inspirations had already been appropriated by quicker thinkers than me, or I realized they were cognates of old-person memes.

But my new nom de plume is great—it’s edgy, classic and yet of-the-moment, and has that sort of familiar ring to it that makes it feel just right. And as far as I know, no one else is using it yet. You heard it here first!

Thanks for reading,
Trentin Quarantino
4/10/2020

Next time: does coronavirus make a good sourdough starter?