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Fathers Day is as good a time as any to ponder the paternal household duty of mowing the lawn.
Granted, it isn't always a masculine task. I grew up in a traditional family, but my mom mowed until her sons were big enough to start hating the chore.
Our lot here is small, only 4,500 square feet, and we've covered some of it with a patio, and keep a woodpile in back. But there remains some grass.
When the city raised water rates a few years ago, I pondered replacing the lawn with a xeriscape, as many other Salidans did. Most replacements were seriously ugly. When I spotted the rare nice one, I inquired and learned that attractive xeriscapes take more maintenance than a Windows computer. So we stuck with grass.
I had a gasoline-powered rotary mower that always started on the first pull and did not require fiddling with choke, throttle or fuel-oil mixture. One day last summer, it wouldn't start.
There was one great scene in the 1989 movie "Blaze," based on Louisiana Gov. Earl Long in the 1950s. He takes up with a stripper, Blaze Starr, and rumors fly that he's crazy. A journalist goes to investigate.
Earl and Blaze are at a farmhouse. Blaze sits on the porch and talks to the reporter. In the background, Earl tries to start a mower. He pulls and pulls. It won't start. He stomps away.
Just as Blaze says something like "Gov. Long is the sanest man I know," Earl returns with a shotgun and blasts the mower into pieces.
That's exactly how I felt, but I wasn't sane enough to borrow a 12-gauge. Instead I shopped for a new mower.
A muscle-powered reel mower was the greenest alternative. I used to use one. But they don't work well when the grass gets even a little too high, and I'm quite good at waiting until Saturday to cut grass that should have been mowed on Tuesday.
Reel mowers don't mulch, so you have clippings. You can keep them out of the landfill by composting them, but compost piles attract bears, and we have trouble enough with deer in the yard.
Gas power was out. Not only for starting problems, but there's also the hazard of storing gasoline. They're also more dangerous because after you get one started, you tend to leave it running, even when you shouldn't.
That left electricity. Batteries make the mower heavy, and our tiny yard has odd spots that require wrestling the machine around.
So I got a light mower that just plugs into the 100-foot extension cord I already had. It always starts, so I feel free to turn it off when appropriate, rather than hope my foot doesn't slip into the spinning blade. No fumes, Xcel Energy is responsible for any related air pollution, and it's fairly quiet.
The cord isn't as much of a hassle as I thought it might be, once I figured out that back-and-forth now works better than around-and-around.
I sometimes imagine that a clever botanist once devised a breed of perennial grass that grows no more than 2.5 inches high and stays thick and green on less than a foot of annual precipitation. But the rights were bought up by a consortium of mower makers, fertilizer firms, yard-care companies, seed sellers and water utilities, so that they might all stay in business.
Of course, that variety of grass is no more real than that a fail-safe oil-well blowout preventer, or that mythical 100-mpg carburetor that Big Oil won't let you buy for your car.
Anyway, if you haven't figured out something yet for Fathers Day, go mow his lawn. Trust me, dad will be grateful.
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