Lawn Musings

Wonderful thing about cutting the grass, you can solve all the problems of the world while doing it. The only bad part is that the clarity of you solutions dissipate in inverse proportion to the length of time since the engine has been turned off.* In other words, as quick as summer vacation ends for a 9 year old.

Upon my return from Europe I again had access to my lawn tractor. I’ve always called it a lawn mower but after this story, it can only be a lawn tractor—you don’t do things like this to mowers. It was my first non-borrowed riding mower and I was quite proud of it. Not quite as proud as Lowe’s was of it, but I did get a pretty sweet deal on it. Each time I used it I washed it and put it back in the garage taking good care of it.

It was to my horror to see that the people who rented my house did not take a similar level of care for it. Having been left out in the rain (a lot) and not being washed down means that there are stains, the seat is separating from its support, and there is a small oil leak in the front. The battery no longer seems to hold a charge, which means you can’t get up after you start it unless you want to push it back into the garage.

When I first used it to cut the grass it was very difficult and strange. Now the grass was quite high so I thought that was it but it did some strange things: bogging down when I reversed, strange metallic noises when I turned, and it didn’t seem to be cutting at its full 48 inch capacity. I have never liked to weed eat so when I got done there were clippings all over and spots that needed weed eating which made the yard look almost as bad as it had before I cut it.

Fast forward a few days, maybe a week. My brother-in-law came over and cut (and weed eat) the yard after which it looked fantastic. He has a mulching blade on his mower and I decided it was time for me to change the blades. There were no mulching conversion kits at Lowe’s though. I also had problems with my grill but there are more things people are low or out of. It’s almost like the whole world quit working for a few months.

Finally, the kit arrived in the mail and I went to change the blades. First two went without a problem but then I noticed the third blade was missing. That explained the weird cut. The next day I went to purchase a new bolt, in typical fashion I got the wrong bolt, but when I took one of the others off to use as a reference I found out that I couldn’t bolt it in. Something was wrong with the threads or the spindle or both. So it was back to the internet. Meanwhile, trying to figure out how to take out the spindle I realized that there was a broken bracket holding the deck on. This explained the backing up problems as well as the noises. Mystery solved meant it was time for a solution.

The bracket as a solution was a pretty good idea but not very restrictive in movement for something so prone to vibration. After all, the deck does contain 3 spinning blades all working in conjunction with one another to eliminate the height of grass while simultaneously allowing a provision for pondering world changing events with a clarity unmatched by any genius or think tank in the known free world. So we added another bracket. But of course, if we only had one to start with we needed to look for what was on hand and use that. This did not turn out to be as big a problem as it could have been because with the arrival of my furniture from Germany came my supply of extra parts, pieces, and dreadfully important things I couldn’t live without. Finding them in the crowded garage would of course be a problem as I hadn’t unpacked most of it yet.

The second bracket was smaller but no less important than the first. It was what I could find because at that point neither one of us wanted to admit defeat by having to go back to the hardware store. The fact that the store was already closed meant little compared to the fact that what it really meant was that we’d have to go a much further distance to reach The Home Depot or Lowe’s.

The problem is that even with the second bracket the piece still was not going to hold. It was sandwiched in between the remaining pieces of broken weld that it didn’t move, but it still really needed another bracket. One we didn’t have. You may notice the pattern below the deck in the pictures. That’s from Ginger’s car, I put the deck in her vehicle so I could find a welder. And that is the point of the story.

I have found in life that the best situation to be in if you don’t know something is to know someone who does. Next best is to find someone who does. Not being a welder, I found one. One that some might have thought a little sketchy. As I pulled into the dirt road and saw a half-built house, Kubota front end loader, and a fire burning with what looked like construction trash I had every reason to doubt I was in the right place. But this is Alabama where this can also be interpreted as the right place for what I needed.

Once the guy looked at what he did his first response was that he would have to charge me extra because of the repair job we had done. Then he said never to use JB Weld on anything structural. Followed in rapid succession by “Are you an engineer?” In my brief defense I had on a t-shirt from the first Corps of Engineers construction job I worked on so it wasn’t a huge mental leap.

After all that, he cut off the old brackets and welded the thing better than it was when I bought it. Then we proceeded to have one of those long, drawn out Southern conversations which rambled (though it was interesting) and included not once but twice hunkering down to draw a sketch in the dirt with a stick. Classic good ol’ boy conversation. I went back home and reattached the deck and cut the grass. This was two weeks before Hurricane Sally.

The Saturday before Sally hit I went out to cut my grass. The first unwritten rule of hurricanes is cut your grass the day before it arrives because you don’t know when you’ll be able to cut it afterwards. But the thing wouldn’t start. I tinkered to no avail then asked three different people who all suggested I needed a new battery. I did, but that still didn’t fix it. The storm came and went before I finally figured out it was the main fuse.

I wasn’t able to figure this out until two Saturdays after Sally but finally I was able to cut the grass and with my new mulcher eliminate both the clippings and the nagging storm debris leaves and sticks. When I finished I thought there were more clippings left than I wanted so I decided to go over the front yard again.

People say that things happen in threes. But people are idiots. If you wait long enough something else will happen. I laughed hard than I should have when this happened.

As I rounded the corner the wheel took off and I wondered which would stop first, the wheel or the lawn tractor. Turns out they both stopped at the same time.

Apparently the wisdom you gain while cutting the grass leaves even faster when the job is cut short due to technical problems. No new revelations about what drives or fixes the world, but a whole lot of drama in getting the job done. Just another day in paradise living in the bubble and loving the mundane.

*The analogy only works with powered lawn mowers (gas, electric, or other) as manually powered lawn mowing devices come with their own requirements for thinking. How am I going to not cut my prize daffodils, how will this push mower handle the holes in the back yard, and why didn’t I spring for a powered mower. There is an entire subset of thoughts that go along with a robotic mower but I came up with them while mowing.