Lawn care-induced stress

 This is a tale of suburban angst: a homeowner who can't get his grass cut.

Until yesterday, I owned an old relic of a lawn mower, a Toro with a six horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine.  I had purchased it a least 20 years ago.  It mulched and bagged, a little less efficiently every year but still well enough to get the job done.  

Every year at the beginning of March I contact the dealer who had sold me the mower.  They send a trailer around to my home, take the mower away and tune it up, whatever that means.  Probably they would tell me it's a 43-point inspection or some such, but from what I can tell, it consists of sharpening the blade, scraping and cleaning the undercarriage, changing the oil and the air filter, possibly replacing the spark plug once in a while, and hosing the thing off so it looked a little shinier when they return it.  I could do all of those things myself except for sharpening the blade - that is the item that makes the drop-off and pickup service worth it to me.  A month or so after the dealer picked up the mower, the trailer would show up at my house again, drop off the tuned-up mower, and we'd proceed with keeping our lawn looking at least minimally respectable for another season.  

I followed the same pattern this year, sending in the lawn mower in early March.  But the mower didn't come back at the customary time.  Three weekends ago, some of the neighbors already had cut their grass for the first time this season.  Two weekends ago, nearly all of them had done so.  But not us - our mower was still in the shop.  I think ours was the only lawn on our block which hadn't been mowed yet.  

So early last week, I finally called the shop.  An automated greeting on their phone system explained that, due to the pandemic, their work was backed up.  I confess it's not immediately clear why that should be - I think one can tune up a lawn mower while maintaining proper social distancing.  But it is said there is a labor shortage at the moment (a curiosity, given that unemployment still is relatively high, but the pandemic makes for strange times).  At any rate, when I spoke to someone in the service department, she promised to get me the mower later that week, and it showed up on the appointed delivery date. 

By then, our lawn was looking pretty unkempt.  It looks like a lawn looks when you skip two or three cycles of mowing.  Our lawn spray service had shown up at its appointed time a couple of weeks ago and sprayed, so the grass had received a recent supercharge of nutrients, and the weather has been fairly rainy so there is no shortage of water.  Our grass has been thriving and growing.  The bunnies and other critters in our backyard were loving it - it's the most ground cover they've had in years.  

But for me, it was excruciating.  Every time I glanced out the window and saw the lush, thick, uneven growth, my stomach tightened.  One aspect of living in the suburbs is that neighbors can get really judgy.  I found urban living much less judgmental: most city dwellers are pretty anonymous, and pretty tolerant of others, as long as the others mind their own business and don't commit any crimes.  But in the suburbs, most families also are property owners, and owners want to see properties kept up.  A small fraction of that is communal esprit de corps, but about 97% of it is a wish to protect property values.  One doesn't want to be the neighborhood slob whose dilapidated house or unmowed lawn reflects poorly on the neighbors' properties.  Some of the neighbors work really hard on the outward appearance of their properties, spending hours each week getting their lawn, shrubs, flower beds and so on looking picture-perfect.  One guy whose property backs into ours is out with the leaf blower once an hour during the autumn because falling leaves (including from our trees) land on his patio, and he doesn't want his patio sullied by fallen leaves.  I lack the skill, time and interest to have one of those Home and Garden showpiece homes, but I do have minimal standards.

So it was with stress and frustration that I watched our grass continue to grow the rest of the week.  Even though the mower was back from the shop, a combination of my work schedule and the weather prevented me from mowing midweek.  But finally the weekend arrived, with promising weather for lawn mowing.  I didn't even wait until Saturday; on Friday after work, I got the mower out of the shed, gassed it up, pulled the starter cord - and nothing happened.  It didn't "catch" - didn't start up.  I pumped a little more gasoline into the engine, pulled again - and nothing.  I pulled the cord at least 25 times, sometimes harder, sometimes less hard, but the blankety-blank thing wouldn't start.  I waited a half hour or so for gas to drain out of the engine, pulled the cord about 15 more times - and still nothing.

By now I was in a full-blown panic.  The grass was up to my waist.  Well, not really, but it was far longer than I ever ever wish it to grow.  My neighbors on either side pointedly cut their grass - for the second or third time this season - on Friday evening.  

I called the repair shop, but it had closed for the day.  My wife let me know that one of our kids' friends from school days now owned a lawn care company, so I called them - I would have paid them to do my lawn for this week, to buy me a few days to figure out what to do about the non-functioning mower.  Nobody answered.  (As I write this on a Monday, midmorning, I still haven't heard back from either the shop, which already has collected my payment for the tune-up, nor from the lawn care service.  If one is interested in understanding why many new businesses don't succeed, cf my experience.)

By Saturday, I saw my options as:

• Get the mower back to the repair shop.  I didn't have a line of sight to how long it would take to fix the mower, but my confidence level wasn't high that they would do the right thing and fix it immediately.  For all I knew, they had a couple of hundred other customers who were equally desperate to get their mowers back.  And there was no guarantee the mower was repairable - it's at least 20 years old
• Hire someone to cut my lawn.  I would have been starting from scratch to find a service, and didn't know how quickly one could get out to our home and cut the grass
• Buy a new mower.  This would solve the uncut lawn problem - I could buy a new mower immediately, and almost certainly get the grass mowed that weekend.  And it would set me up for several more years (at least).  But it would cost several hundred dollars

We gulped twice and decided to buy a new one.  On Saturday afternoon, I spent an hour or so on the Consumer Reports website to learn which makes and models they recommend which wouldn't set us back too much.  Then we went to Home Depot to see what they had in stock.

These days, one can buy gasoline or battery-powered lawn mowers.  All else being equal, I'd prefer battery power because it seems kinder to the environment.  But the decision is a little complicated:

• Battery powered mowers are more expensive - they cost about $100 more than comparably equipped gasoline-powered mowers, from what I was able to tell
• I have experience with, and trust, gasoline mower brands like Toro and Honda.  Frankly, I had never heard of the top-rated battery mower brands like Ryobi and Ego.  The online reviews for the battery-powered mowers were pretty mixed.  Consumers didn't seem to love them unconditionally.
• It wasn't easy to determine how long the battery life is.  My property is a quarter acre, and it usually takes the better part of an hour to mow the front and back yards.  The battery life on one model was 45 minutes, on another 30 minutes.  For other models, it didn't say.
• I read somewhere recently that recharging battery-operated autos actually is more carbon-fuel-intensive than owning an internal combustion engine vehicle.  I don't know whether that's actually true, nor whether the same consideration extends to lawn mowers  

So I ended up buying another gasoline mower, a Honda.  It works fine.  I mowed on Sunday, going over a lot of the lawn twice to ensure the grass clippings were mulched.

I was outside a few minutes ago.  I glanced with satisfaction at our front lawn.  And I noticed that our neighbor, who doesn't hire a lawn spray service, has 10 or 12 dandelions blooming on his front lawn.  Tch tch.