Chewing the Sod

You may think I have my expressions or idioms mixed up. Quite the contrary. Much like a cow chews the cud, so my new favorite lawn mower munches on the sod (grass). This lawn mower is actually not new at all. It has to be about 47 years old, judging by the rust, and its resistance to actually perform as it was designed to. But I just spent 3 hours, not including an hour-long break, mowing a very, very large lawn. My parents and I spent the weekend at the lakehouse. And when we arrived on Saturday, my parents began trimming trees and I thought it would be nostalgic to mow the lawn. Nostalgia is not something I experienced. Not after the first 12 minutes anyway. You see, I have not used a lawn mower for at least ten years. We have a lawn service that comes every couple of weeks to our house in Miami. And the lawn mower looked to me like something out of a frontier era, fitting in well with other technologies from the time of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ where Americans were destined to conquer the far west reaches of the continent. But they must have had stronger backs than I. They must have had better lawn mowers. And they certainly would have had less ‘wild’ grass than I encountered. I know this, because this lawn mower and I struggled like salmon going upstream. Somewhere along the way, I would say after my break, I caught my breath, the breeze from the lake pushed in, the sun went behind the clouds, and the lawnmower died… again. That did not stop me. I think the third time I pulled on the rip cord to try and start it up, it realized I wasn’t quitting. Lazily, it sprang to life. We bonded, old sod-muncher and I. I call it a sod-muncher because the blades of grass got bent and frayed, not sharply cut. With a strange sense of curiosity, excitement and nausea, I look forward to the next time I am called upon to mow the lawn.