A new moan, hey?

So I'm out mowing my lawn tonight, and a middle-aged couple and their daughter are out for a constitutional, and as they pass by, he says to me, "That there's one thing I'd never be able to do. First time out I'd cut the cord."

See, after six seasons or so years of faithful service without even an oil change, the transmission on my 6.5 horsepower Sears Craftsman self-propelled mower seized up, and the mower became as balky as pushing a wheelbarrowful of cinder blocks over a railroad track. So after researching the matter, including some bank balance inspection, I decided to go for a cheaper option: a swingover-handled Black & Decker electric push mower.

Mowing a lawn using a device that has a swath width of "an average commercial string trimmer" (a derisive but probably accurate measure authored by my stepson-in-law), one requiring about 200 feet of grounded power cord, comes down to how well you did in geometry. The front lawn is encumbered by two young maple trees and a slightly older peach tree. So navigating the mower becomes an exercise in devising the most efficient, least annoying layout. The maples are not bad, because at their age they have not branched out wildly. The same cannot be claimed for the peach. Not only is the peach a wide-branching tree, but is also a variety that branches low to the ground. I believe it may have been a lawn-mowing person who invented the limbo.

At any rate, I smiled back at the gentleman and parried, "Sounds like you're speaking from my experience!"

"Not on your life," he shot back. "I know my limits!"

And off they went. I chuckled, and resumed trying to calculate the square on the hypotenuse that would best describe the next half of my lawn cutting pattern. He had triggered a memory of a time in Thunder Bay when I was out trying to use an electric snow thrower as a Zamboni on our backyard rink. Of course, electric cord meets no resistance on ice, and so in one startling instant, twenty feet of fairly new outdoor cable was severed and tightly wrapped around the paddle and axle of the thrower. Ah, the memories.

I console myself by thinking that the carbon footprint from the lawnmower is probably much less than that of its predecessor. This may be fallacious, if, indeed as it seems, it takes three times as long to cut the grass. But the other consolation is that it is not nearly as noisy. I can even hear the barking dogs and the revving Harleys even while scalping my yard.

I sure do miss that gas mower.