The Zen of Mowing the Lawn

I miss green. When you live in the mid-Atlantic region, winter is a combination of grays and browns punctuated by white if it gets cold enough. It isn't green.

Last summer, I came to be our family's primary lawn caretaker after my husband went back into the golf world full-time. The life of a golf professional leaves little time for things like lawn maintenance, even though my golf pro is extremely particular about the appearance of his lawn. So, to help out, I took over the weekly mowing. This exercise helped shape a new appreciation of green.

Our yard is large, with multiple levels and beds to mow around. It's a walk-behind job, to be certain. While our neighbors use lawn tractors and riding mowers, we have a self-propelled gas mower. Each weekend, while my neighbors hopped on their tractors and mowed straight lines across their flat yards, I started our mower and headed for a far corner. And while I mowed mostly straight lines, they were never the same lines week to week. Instead, each week I created a new pattern based on the previous week's lines.

If I started at the corner of our border with Scott's yard the previous week, then I moved to the opposite corner and mowed north to south rather than east to west. The effect was a yard with a cross-hatch pattern one week, a checkerboard the next, opposing lines the following, and a circular patterns at least every five or so weeks. Many times, our neighbors asked how we achieved the look and most important, why we mowed the way we mowed.

The answer is three-fold: It's better for the grass, it looks cool, and working on the patterns meant that they only thing I thought about for the 90 or so minutes it took me to mow was the green grass. I shut out all other thoughts and distractions and concentrated on ensuring that my patterns were "right."

I came to appreciate the depth of color in the grass. I saw how it grew differently based on the amount of sun exposure in each part of the yard, and I become an expert in judging when it needed supplemental watering, or a weeding and feeding treatment.

The mower helped me execute a simple yet complex suburban exercise each week that gave me a great sense of satisfaction. I feel the same way about my work. The ability to take simple ideas and become completely immersed in helping them to take new forms to accomplish new goals is both a challenge and a luxury. And doing so gives me a great sense of pride.

Just as having a great looking, green yard does. I'm ready to get behind that mower again.