Lawnmower Men

Posted on April 8, 2004 in Daily Life Gardens Neighborhood

I went out for an early morning appointment. When I came home, a crew of orange-vested gardeners were hacking at the lawns, bringing the blades of grass down to a specified height of about one and a half inches. Two of the mowers ate babies: they used these on the large sectors. A third was more the size of the engine I used when I had to ravage the grass beneath the poisonous Brazillian Pepper Tree. A fourth man ran an edge trimmer which raised blue sparks whenever it touched the sidewalk. The last of the crew walked around with a weed eater, carrying it overhead between the trees like a halberd.

Amputated stalks of dead grass litter the streets of the complex. Lumps of wet grass hold together in the middle of the road. They are too green to have been left by horses.

For the rest of this day I shall fight headache, stuffy sinuses, and perhaps nausea as broken pieces of our property association mandated greenery float in the air, looking to lunge into my lungs.

If people lived with the land instead of trying to make it somewhere else, I wouldn’t have this problem.