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In Praise of the Push Reel Mower
I am up early drinking coffee and looking for that balanced time when the dew has dried but the heat of the day has not kicked in. Today is the day I get to mow my lawn. When I bought my house a couple years ago and needed to get a mower it was a pretty easy selection. My biggest factor was my carbon footprint and the push reel mower rocks on that front. Two stroke engines are terribly polluting and the noise and the gas and oil and the space just made it not seem worth it. My yard is of some size so I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a chore at times. My 73 year old pappy rues the choice cuz he likes mowing lawn, likes doing his share, but the push reel is too tough. He also likes to point out that he’s done his share on the push reel back in his childhood and still remembers fondly when his parents upgraded to a motorized mower. Having seen the size of my grandma’s yard I can’t hardly blame him. But I figure I need the exercise. I don’t go to the gym which seems artificial and strange. There is so much physical work that needs to be done and by doing everything by hand I get the opportunity to work out. Mostly its biggest drawback is the time. Its a strange balancing act of matching weather, schedule and personal energy to get ‘er done. The trick to good push reel mowing is to stay ahead of it. When the grass gets tall or is too damp the mower just pushes it over. I also like to go back over it with a weed whip and hit the grass stalks and heavy stems. The end result looks as good as anyone’s. I’ve also come to enjoy the quiet. When Amee and I lived in Toledo I used to call the guy down the street using his leaf blower excessively “manscaping”. Why do by hand which you can do with noisy power tools seems to be the ethic. I am just the opposite. I dig my garden, double dig in fact, by hand, rake my leaves, push reel the lawn, for the quiet and the clean and it just feels more serene. Machines have always made me nervous. I was a natural Luddite and I organize my life to that effect. Sure I have my ’92 pick up but when the timing belt chews its way through the engine block I may not replace it. I enjoy not driving. I’ll bike more, stay closer to home, start walking to the store. Its where we all need to go if we believe in justice or enjoy living on the planet earth. Everyone can’t drive a combustion car and a living planet. We all can have a bike, a place to call home, the internet, and maybe even a push reel mower.
bread and circuses
Maybe a road trip is the ideal time to remember that not only is BP responsible for the oil spill catastrophe but I am as well. I drive they drill ducks get oily. I wish I could get mad like so many of my peers but I don’t feel holy enough to point my finger at anyone at BP. Maybe if I knew more I could know they’re more guilty than me. I know I feel bad because I allow it to happen, and go to baseball games. There’s this whole level of engagement in professional sports that i have gone from experiencing and taking a critical eye. I can easily understand how Marx would consider it an opiate for the masses, some piece of false consciousness to distract us from the oily ducks and the exploitation of man by man. Nonetheless I was thrilled to see Tommy Brookins, whom i listed along with Larry Norman as people I thought were self actualized in my high school psych class. I loved Tommy Brookins, and Kirk Gibson, and Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammel, and all those guys who won the pennant with Sparky. At the game there was a child like joy, mostly in the children. A toddler stood on her mom’s lap and when i would cheer for the Tigers she would too. I told her mom she was raising a little Tiger’s fan. It was fun, engaging, we all shared something. I ran into my friend Isaiah who I thought was a Cubs fan, when I asked him he said, “no, i’m a baseball fan”. If you’ve ever read George Will with an open mind you can’t believe baseball is only false consciousness. A perfect world might need baseball, as well as clean oceans and beaches. My dad has that same childlike spirit about baseball. He knows it all, every Tiger and what they’ve been doing, what their stories are, what pitches they throw and then. Who swings at the first pitch and how quickly they take between pitches. It keeps him engaged in this world. It may be the most important thing in his life. If its not shedding crocodile tears over the fucked up gulf and plotting with his class peers for the dictatorship of the proletariot then fuck Marx and his judgemental bullshit. But nonetheless I drove a gulf oil eating machine halfway across the state to see millionaires play baseball. I am not doing nor planning on doing a damn thing for the oily ducks and all that other bullshit even though I think I am cognizant of how truly awful it all is and that i am personally responsible. A client asked me how bad it really was because he doesn’t trust the news. I told him second cup bad. What? The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died (Revelations 16:3). I refuse the simple comfort of anger at BP and put faith that how i live my life justifies my part in this horrible piece of evil filth our works have created. It will remind me to step up my game, to work smarter if not harder to disengage from the madness. Engage more in the solution.
“Live in a Garden”
I can’t believe i haven’t posted this one its one of my favorites. I’ve finished posting all the stuff i’m gonna from “America” and am now putting up stuff from Atonal Musings which i put together in 2001. The first verse goes back to my manic break down and my first big flurry of poetry. I was stalled there for a couple of years when i got my break through by changing my imaginary audience to this three year old boy whose family i was working with. Writing for kids helped me wrap my mind around what i was trying to do and it brought in all the farm animals.
We could live in a garden
Watch the apple trees sway
In the gentle breeze
While the chipmunks play
We won’t have jobs or have bills to pay
We’ll live simple lives but it’ll be OK
Because we’ll live in a garden
We’ll have to milk the cow
Feed the chickens and ducks
And slop the old sow
We’ll ask some old people
When we don’t know how
There’ll be Sea Monkeys on Thursday
If you start them now
Because we live in a garden
We just don’t act that way
Trapped in buildings and cars
Almost every single day
If you only remember one thing I say
The world is a garden so treat it that way
beautiful spring days
Thank god for beautiful spring days. sarah came over for coffee before we went to the market with harry. there was more of a crowd even early and everyone was loving the beautiful days. got eggs of course, the big bag of spinach, brats, goat cheese, everything else i still had from last week. sarah got flowers for amy’s bridal shower and i donated a tulip and a prettier than theirs daffodil. Sarah was impressed with how much stuff i had going when we did the grand tour.
I couldn’t turn up my proof of personal property tax so i went down town to see if i could get a copy and couldn’t. While i was downtown i grabbed some Kaldi’s beans. Got a relationship Brazilian light roast (excellent} and a sumatran. I tried the relationship Montserrat and it was good. Kaldis really knows how to roast a bean.
I also had gotten bacon at the market but it was frozen so i offered to get everyone breakfast at Midway Truckstop. Had the french toast, fair. Dad had the hamburger steak and eggs that i usually get but wasn’t hungry enough.
After breakfast we went out to the Overton Bottoms and checked on the trees we had planted (oaks, pecans, and other hard nut trees, with the idea over the next 3 or 4oo years the trees would mature and the nuts would wash downstream to propagate along the river banks. The Bottoms are a cool area that got protected after the big flood of ’93, thank you slick willy, and are going from pasture/farm land to wooded wetland. We checked on our trees, the switch grass wasn’t out yet so we couldn’t check in on that and then looked fruitlessly for morels. the dogs enjoyed meandering around the forest. Myrtle soaked in the Big Muddy but Oni wasn’t having any of that.
Since we were shroomless we filled our bags with garlic mustard. Its a pernicious problem there and I had volunteered on a pull last year. There was less of it but the seeds take two years so it was to be expected to be back in force, and it was.
Came home and dad watched the tigers beat the indians, harry finished digging up the spring bed and planted lettuces, mesculin mix, and arugula. I mowed the front yard. Yea. The push reel works with my impaired arm. i felt like i could have mowed the back but decided to be cautious and wait until tomorrow.
Instead i painted the black stripes on the rain barrels. They are closer to being done, on two of them we are going to run the pipe straight into them. One bush will have to be trimmed. On the southwest corner we need to do a flex pipe so we don’t have to move the garden gate. Dad thinks its going to be frost free. He started cutting on the red bud stump but it was thicker than the saw and it still stands. He wants to pull it over with a chain and his truck. We swung the axe at it some. Its fun i couldn’t cut my french toast with a fork but i can swing an axe. weird.
In between those last things i cooked some supper. I cooked up a good size batch of the mustard greens with some local bacon. I fried the bacon in small pieces, threw in red onion, and then the garlic mustard in the water that clung to it when i washed it. I added malt vinegar. When i tried it it was pretty bitter so i squeezed in the juice of a key lime and added some braggs, it turned out good but i wouldn’t want a steady diet of it. Harry is going to try some with ham bone and great northern beans. I also made a pack of the brats pulled in a third of a Mickeys with the rest of the red onion and some amy’s mac & cheese with garlic powder and basil.
We’re finishing up the evening with a little 2o12. Neutrinos shaking up the earths quest. doesn’t bold well with my perennials. I do like me some apocalyptic fiction though.
Spring Break 2010 Part 2 (everglades to ft meyers)
We ended up camping three nights in the Everglades, mostly bird watching and some hiking. One morning John and I both woke early so as not to disturb the rest of the camp we drove up to the marina got a cup of coffee and went and watched the sun rise over a lake. We had some nice company with a night heron fishing nearby who didn’t seem terribly alarmed at our presence. All in all it was a nice relaxing time.
We packed out early to head back to Big Cypress National Preserve. Driving out of the park I was profoundly struck on the abrupt change from the swamps to the agricultural lands. The absence of life was striking coming from where so close it is so thick. What a loss we have with these huge monocrop wastelands. It was really more like a desert than anything else. So sad and such a wrongness around it it could’ve broken my heart. i always cope with things like this by remembering it hasn’t always been this way and it is not always going to be this way its just this way right now. i send out prayers for effective preservation and using the park to build on restoring the whole ecosystem.
At Big Cypress we drove the loop road the other way and again parked near Sweet Water Strand and this time hiked the other way. There were a lot of alligators sunning themselves not only on the canal banks but out in the road. The dogs seemed like they couldn’t see the gators and were totally unconcerned. I think with the gators staying still and being unfamiliar to the dogs they just couldn’t see them. Probably for the best that the dogs don’t know whats out there waiting to eat ’em up.
From there we started our drive back North. We stopped in Ft Meyers and got a room. The next afternoon we went out to Pine Island and visited our longtime friend Jay and his wife CeeCee. They have a place right on a canal and Jay was eager to take us boating. Smokey was as ready as anyone but Shadow took some coaxing. Once we were out there though they really enjoyed it, except for when Smokey fell in the canal when we stopped for gas.
The wildlife was thick in the canals as they bordered on mangroves. So close to the city there was this huge explosion of life that rivaled the everglades. Gave me hope that we can live in some kind of harmony that allows biodiversity and wild beauty and still have all of the social goods of urbanity. We saw manitee, a bald eagle, dolphins, and the usual cast of avian characters. The Bay was calm so we got the canal boat out and frolicked with the dolphins a bit before putting back to home.
Jay made a nice lunch and we took a drive over to another bald eagle nest. There was one in the nest and one on a nearby branch. The one on the branch took wing and the one in the nest eventually joined him calling back and forth. It was really really cool. We decided to wrap up our visit while our hosts still thought the dogs were cute and headed back to our room.
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