Oh, it’s so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m actually publishing this in my blog.
I bought a lawnmower.
I’m so ashamed! For years I looked askew at those men who woke early on weekend mornings, an hour before the ordinary and righteous people of the world stopped sleeping in, and in ragged cutoffs and loosely laced tennis shoes marched patterns on the grasses, the noise of their infernal machines scaring away the birds. I could never understand their longing for the perfect edge, or the wet confetti that stuck to their legs; that grassy smell mixed with exhaust, or the sweat that accumulated in their armpits; the perfection of accessories and specialized tools no other vehicles ever require, like the blade sharpener, the waste bags, the hard black plastic spoon; or worst of all, the weekly devotion to the seeding, wetting, weeding, and heading of a hundred thousand living objects destined to grow back.
This subculture of worship is so alien to the child, the student, the renter, and the condo owner that never once was I offered membership. Instead and unexpectedly, I got thrown overboard from a sinking economy, dashed upon the rocks of my mortgage, and stranded on an island in a sea of greens, worried about the vegetative tide. My new friends at the hardware store were sympathetic, especially when I couldn’t speak “acres.” They talked to me about mulching blades and car engines. They sold me a gas can. And that weekend I collected sticks and rocks and toys, a fatherly mix of Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus, before filling the tank and pumping the choke and yanking the string. (Naturally I spilled gas everywhere and couldn’t figure out the safety bar.)
In my early twenties, I joined the Sierra Club and spent 8 days in the Arizona desert. Every day away from civilization I learned just how unnecessary and even trivial certain amenities can be: television, phone answering machines, laundry machines, even toilets. I discovered that we don’t need these things to survive and live well and simply. I missed my friends and family, and nothing else. And so I try to tell myself that mowing the lawn really isn’t necessary, that if I can give up flush toilets I can sure give up cutting the grass. I even try to explain this to my Sunday-morning neighbors, all of us like synchronized swimmers with our machines, but of course they can’t hear me over the noise.
I miss the desert.