The lawn guy is going to clean up our leaves this year, and now I'm having a crisis of identity

The AI Blog Post Image Generator did a better job with this fake photo than it did on Wednesday's post, but I still question this AI-generated landscaper's facial features.

Many years ago when I worked at the Cleveland Clinic, I had frequent opportunity to interact with Dr. Roger Mee, a world-renowned pediatric heart surgeon. In addition to being very good at his job and a nice man, he was also quite wealthy.

Or at least wealthy enough to own one of the finer homes in our area, located in what is often referred to as the "tony" Cleveland suburb of Gates Mills. The house happens to be situated along the route we take to and from church each Sunday, so we pass it constantly.

Quite often when I drove by during my Clinic years, I would see Dr. Mee on a small riding mower cutting the grass. You have to understand, this stately home is located on a very large lot. There are acres of grass there, and from what I could tell, Dr. Mee would cut all of it himself.

One of the best pediatric heart surgeons in the world, who commanded a commensurately high salary, was out there for hours at a time mowing his lawn.

This always amazed me, and one time I asked him about.

"Dr. Mee," I said, "I see you on your riding mower all the time. Do you always cut the grass yourself?"

He said he did.

"How long does it take you?"

"About 5 or 6 hours."

"Wow, is it a stress reliever?"

"The first 3 hours are. The rest of it is just a pain in the ass."

Yet there he was, week in and week out, keeping that grass trimmed even though I'm sure he could easily have afforded a landscaper to do it for him.

That has always impressed me, particularly since I now pay someone to mow my much-smaller lawn.

Nick, our landscaper, does an excellent job. Like Dr. Mee, he's very good at what he does. If I was going to hire someone, I'm not sure I could have made a better choice.

But as I mentioned in a post here a few months ago, having a lawn guy (not to mention a snow plow guy) takes some getting used to.

I spent 30 years cutting my own grass. Even when I really didn't feel up to it, I always took some pride in doing the job myself.

Then I started earning extra income as a PA announcer, and suddenly the luxury of having someone else out there in the yard sweating instead of me became a real possibility.

Hiring Nick has turned out to be a good move, at least when I'm not questioning my own masculinity for turning the job over to him. I can never quite shake the feeling that I'm shirking one of my key responsibilities as husband/dad.

Now, with the advent of fall, it gets even better...or worse, depending on how you look at it.

Over the next couple of weeks, Nick is going to collect the leaves in our half-acre lot and deposit them near the street for the city to pick up. None of us will have to touch a rake or pull a tarp laden with leaves. He will handle the whole thing, and being Nick, he will handle it well.

It will be more than worth the cost to have him do it.

Still...I can't help but look at those as my leaves piling up in my yard. Part of me still believes it's my job to gather them up and haul them out of there.

I'm sure I'll get over this feeling in time, but honestly, how do rich people who weren't born rich adjust to having gardeners and nannies and such? I can't imagine.

Not that I'm aching to go outside and fire up the lawn mower or the leaf blower, mind you. But I'll admit, I'm still adjusting to the concept.

I only care so much about my lawn, if I'm being honest

From April through November, I devote an inordinate amount of brain power to figuring out each week when I can cut my grass.

When will I be home to do it? When is it supposed to rain? How long is it now? Will there be enough daylight remaining if I wait until I get home from work?

It takes me about an hour and 15 minutes to do the job using my walk-behind mower. I may eventually give in and buy a riding mower, but for now I really like the exercise opportunity offered up by the walk-behind.

Still, as much effort as I put into making sure the grass is regularly cut, that's the extent of my commitment to the lawn.

I do not water my grass, no matter how long we go without rain. I don't fertilize or aerate it, either. We DO have a lawn guy who handles the fertilizing and weed control, thankfully, because I'm simply not going to do it.

The result is that our backyard is starting to look a little brown and sparse. I don't love that this is happening, but when you consider all of the demands on your time and resources, I feel like the grass falls pretty far down the list.

That's not true for everybody, which is just fine. There's nothing wrong with working to maintain an attractive lawn. It's just not a priority for me.

Eventually I would love to live in a nice house with a small yard where the lawn maintenance gets (presumably) much easier. Maybe we can move to one of the desert states where you have colored gravel in front of your house instead of grass.

To my knowledge, you never have to worry about mowing rocks.

The one reason I don't mind the snow sticking around

 

Twenty-nine years ago this month, Terry and I bought our first house. That means I've been cutting my grass for nearly three decades.

I have a love-hate relationship with lawn mowing.

On one hand, I like the exercise. By the time I finish cutting our grass, I've walked somewhere between 2 and 3 miles. It's a nice way to get those steps in.

Conversely, it's not exactly what I would call fun. On those humid July days when it's already 85 degrees at 10 in the morning, the last thing I want to do is get out there and push the mower around.

To be fair, I don't really push the mower. It actually pulls me, as it's self-propelled and I always crank the speed up just a hair beyond my comfort zone to get the whole thing finished more quickly.

I like the results of lawn mowing, I just don't always fully embrace the process.

To paraphrase author Dorothy Parker, who famously said she hated writing but loved "having written," I am a much bigger fan of "having mowed" than "actually mowing."

As I wrote this post two weeks ago, there was still plenty of snow covering my yard. I don't know what it's going to look like on March 12th as you read this, but the fact is, mowing season is coming, and it's coming soon.

Some years I begin cutting the grass as early as March 20th. Other years, rain and other factors push the start date as far back as late April.

Usually it's somewhere in between, both for me and for my son Jack, who cuts our neighbors' grass.

Once we start cutting, that grass inexorably grows, and we can't stop again until November.

Bottom line: I'm pretty much done with winter at this point, but if it wants to stick around a tad longer and delay the start of the 30th mowing season of my life, that's probably OK.

From snow shovel to lawn mower: The transition looms

You're reading this on March 11th or later, but I'm writing it on February 2nd, which of course is Groundhog Day.

(NOTE: I've been cranking these blog posts out at a prodigious rate this winter. I like being ahead of the game. Way, way, way ahead of the game. It makes me feel better about the whole enterprise.)

As I type, there is something like a foot of snow on the ground here in the Cleveland area, which is guaranteed to happen at least once every winter but generally occurs two or three times. We don't get as much snow as, say, Syracuse does, but we do tend to get more than Minneapolis or Chicago.

Which is why mid-March is such an interesting time in our part of the country. Depending on how quickly spring feels like coming, I am often able to put away the snow removal equipment by this point in the year. But some years, our worst blizzards hold off until the latter part of March and even early April.

It's all seemingly random, and we Northeast Ohioans just kind of roll with it. We start complaining well in advance of Valentine's Day, of course, but we put up with it as long as we have to because we obviously don't have much choice.

By this time of year, I'm itching to break out my lawn mower. I don't really like shoveling snow (in part because it screws up my morning routine), but cutting the grass has never been something I've minded all that much.

We have a decent-sized yard. Not huge, but spacious enough on three-quarters of an acre. We inherited a riding mower when we first moved into the house, but I was never a huge fan of it and didn't mourn when it broke down.

Instead I use a push mower. One with a drive system so that I'm not forced to push the entire weight of the machine around, but still a push mower that cuts only a two-foot swath at a time.

It typically takes me just over an hour to cut our entire yard, and what I love about it is that the results are immediate. I get to the end and then look back over a nice little field of green, uniformly trimmed grass blades that conveys the message, "Hey, this guy actually does at least a little something to take care of his yard. You should admire him."

My wife makes fun of me when it comes to lawn moving, and deservedly so. I plan entire weekends around cutting the grass and when I'll be able to do it, influenced by such factors as the weather and what else is on our schedule. We'll be out someplace and I will, without irony, say the words, "I can't wait to get home and mow the lawn."

It's one of those man things that most husbands do because...just because, I guess. It's a job that falls to us and most of us do it willingly. Or at least we complain less about it than we do about other jobs.

But I'll continue to enjoy pushing my mower around until I can't do it anymore, which given Toro's ingenious Personal Pace Drive system will probably be at least another three decades.

And if I do hit the age of 75 and am still push-mowing, you can be darn sure I'll be wearing plaid shorts and black socks while I'm doing it.

Snow, go away. Bring on grass-cutting season!

I am a lawn warrior

I'm not a gardening type of guy. Many people plant vegetables or do yardwork to relax, but I would rather stick a hot poker in my eye than engage in either of those activities (NOTE: I feel the same way about golf. Remind me to blog about that at some point.)

The extent of my involvement in yard maintenance extends to just two activities. One is mulching. Once a year, I'll trot out the wheelbarrow and haul vast quantities of mulch to various designated spots so that my wife can spread it around and make our yard look halfway presentable.

The other is lawn mowing. I love lawn mowing. Seriously, cutting the grass is the one outdoor chore I don't mind in the least. I take my lawn very seriously.

Not to the point that I apply fertilizer and pull weeds and stuff like that, mind you. Just the actual once-a-week pleasure of firing up my Toro lawnmower and trimming the grass. I love doing it.

For one thing, the results are immediate. It takes me an hour or so to do our entire lawn, and right when I'm finished I can enjoy the finished product. Plant a garden and you're looking at months of work before you can enjoy a tomato on your salad or a slice of zucchini bread. I'm not at all down with the delayed gratification thing.

I have taught three of my children to mow the lawn, and I'm proud to say they're all top-flight grass-cutters. My lawn mowing philosophy, which I have passed on to them, rests on three basic principles:

* Make the first pass straight and the rest will follow suit.
* Outline your mowing area first, then you'll have easily visible boundaries in which to work.
* Mow low, don't listen to the lawn guy.

That last point is important to me. We've had our lawn guy, Bob, for about 20 years now. He charges ridiculously low rates and does a good job keeping the dandelions and other weeds out of our grass. Every time he comes over and applies some sort of toxic chemical to my yard, he leaves behind a note that includes a few handy lawn care tips.

Invariably, one of those tips is "mow on highest setting." I disagree with this. Vehemently. If I were to mow my lawn on the highest setting every time, the grass wouldn't even look like it had been cut. And plus, if we get a rainy spell and I can't get to cutting the grass at the regularly scheduled time, it will be a foot high by the time it dries out.

No, sorry Bob, that's not how we do it. We start out at a medium setting in the spring and gradually work our way down, so that by July we're on the second- or third-lowest setting allowed. I never quite go all the way down  because, while I like my grass low, I don't need it to look like the 18th green at Augusta. (Another golf reference. I'm not sure how that got in there.)

Plus, you want to be careful that the grass doesn't get burned out. We tend to have wet springs and dry summers here in Northeast Ohio. If you cut the grass too low, it all turns brown at some point and then you look like one of those People Who Don't Care. And I desperately want to avoid all appearances of not caring.

Because that's why we cut our grass, right? Sure, there's an element of self-satisfaction to a well-maintained lawn, but more importantly, it makes the neighbors think we're responsible people. And it keeps us on the right side of several city ordinances. We do it mostly to impress others.

I draw up a weekly to-do list, and every week between April and late October or so, one of the items on the list is "mow lawn." Always. And I relish it. When it's time to cut the grass, I become Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" (minus the high cheekbones and occasionally insane on-camera behavior). I'll put on the shades, strap on the iPod, and prepare to do battle with the evil forces of unkempt vegetation. If I had a cool flight suit to complete the ensemble, I would wear that, too.

CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEA FOR MY WIFE: If you were to buy me some sort of fighter pilot flight suit tailored to my exact size and shape, maybe with the words "Lawn Warrior" embroidered on the back, this is an item I would not refuse. I'm just saying.

If you're a suburban dad, one of the mowing issues with which you have to wrestle is whether or not to cut the grass with your shirt off. I tend to be a shirt-on kind of guy. For one thing, I'm a perfectionist, and because I don't have the abs of, say, a Channing Tatum, I would just as soon keep my shirt on, thank you very much.

But the same can't be said of all suburban dads. I admire the ones who clearly don't care at all. They'll do anything outdoors if it gives them a chance to take their shirts off. The result is that, while I may have more overall dignity than they do, they at least don't have the farmer's tan I sport annually at the community pool.

Then there's the problem of obstacles. Before each grass-cutting session, I will take a walk around the front and back yards to see if there's anything that will get in the way of my mowing pleasure. If I find something -- a toy, for example -- I will either yell into the house and get the offending child to come out and remove the obstacle, or I'll remove it myself, grumbling the whole time and making mental notes to exact revenge on the heathen who left it there.

And then we're off and running. As I said, it takes me an hour to cut the grass, and the whole time I'll listen to music on the iPod and generally just enjoy the exercise and the opportunity to be alone for awhile. After I'm finished, I bring out the edger and edge along the driveway. Then I'll sweep up the grass clippings that have made their way onto the asphalt, and voila: a neat, clean lawn for another week.

The sight of it makes me inordinately happy. You don't need to tell me how strange this is. I already know.