Jason M. Jones

On Friday, we sold the reel lawnmower I insisted we buy after moving into our house, and I experienced a strange kind of pang when we let it go. My wife is trying to clear out things we don’t use anymore, and this was one of those items. We’d purchased it with the best intentions. I’m the one who mows the lawn, and so even though my wife presented arguments against it, this was one of those situations where she gave in. I had idealistic reasons for buying it. Mainly, it used manpower rather than gas or electric, so it was safer for the environment and didn’t cause any noise pollution. After all, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the sound that power tools make, the loud buzzing. It grates on my nerves and ups my anxiety. I trace this back to a bad experience with a chainsaw when I was young, but that’s an entirely different story.

Growing up, my parents had a small yard and my father used a reel mower. It didn’t seem too bad. I never saw him struggling with it. Our yard is larger than theirs but I figured I’m young and spry and could handle it. Thus began two years of  overexerted, cursing sweaty Saturday mornings running the reel over our front, side, and back yards. Aside from our yard being a bit larger than my parents’, we have trees and they don’t, which proved the main difference. This contributed to a number of sticks in our yard. The larger sticks weren’t the problem. The small ones got stuck in the blade and stopped me every ten to twenty feet. I’d get to pushing forward in a rhythm and my arms would jerk, my body would keep moving but the mower would stop and I’d hurtle into the handle. “Son of a…” I’d start, and bend down and dislodge the segment of twig that had brought my chore to a grinding halt. Then, of course, if the grass grew past a certain length, the mower would merely bend it down and pass over it without cutting, resulting in a wildly uneven cut.

Suffice it to say after two years of this, my idealism went out the window. I came to hate this mower with all the hatred one can muster for an inanimate object that would prove highly useful if it weren’t that there were other inanimate objects out there that would prove more useful for the same task. We took a chunk of our tax return and purchased an electric mower, the reel mower took a spot in the garage where it stood collecting cobwebs, and I’ve been happier ever since. Electric seems cleaner, a compromise between the environmentally-friendly reel mower and gas-powered, though I guess if they’re burning coal to make the electric it’s a moot point. In any case, that first mow of the year is coming up, and I’m not dreading it the way I used to, but it was too cold this weekend to get out and cut the grass back. All I have to say is good luck to the kid who came and took the reel mower off our hands. May it prove less confounding to you.