Cutting the Lawn

There’s nothing like the smell of a fresh cut lawn.  If you grew up in the Midwest it’s an aroma that brings back a lot of memories. Unfortunately there is only one way to get the smell of fresh cut grass and that is with the lawnmower.

When we moved to Arizona in 1971, my father and I rejoiced in the concept of “desert landscaping.”  He vowed to never cut a lawn again and I’m pretty sure he kept that vow to his final day.  I too made that promise to myself, but with different results.

When I graduated from high school, with no real plans for the foreseeable future, I jumped at the offer of a job that a friend of mine told me about. He had gone to work for a landscaping company, they needed more help and were paying the crazy amount of $2.50 an hour, (this was 1974).  So, it was off to work I went.

My first day on the job was tough, up early, working in the summer sun in Phoenix. Not being overly familiar with many plants I spent most of my morning pulling up what I thought were weeds, till the foreman showed up and informed me that I had been pulling up the groundcover they had recently planted. Lesson learned, I began to develop a discerning eye.

Summer moved on and I became skilled at digging holes, spreading decomposed granite, staking and tying up newly planted trees, etc. There was talk about maybe making me a supervisor!

On all of our large jobs we did 90 days of maintenance. One day my friend who had gotten me the job, David, and I were sent to do the maintenance on one of our large recent jobs, a long greenbelt. It was a good gig, they trusted the two of us to be on our own. I was moving up in the world at the age of 17!

We finished up the work, loaded the cut grass in the back of the truck and loaded our tools into the trailer. Riding lawnmower, hand mowers, rakes, edgers, gas cans, the various tools of the trade, and headed to the freeway and back to the yard. It was Friday afternoon and we were done for the week.

Cruising down the Black Canyon Freeway at 2:30 in the afternoon, ready for the weekend I looked in the rearview mirror. There as plain as day was our riding lawnmower taking a bounce off the freeway, my reaction was immediate and responsible.

“Hey David, did you lock the gate on the trailer?”
“No, I thought you did.”

“S*#T!”

We pulled over, pushed the faintly recognizable mower to the side and saw that we were also missing two push mowers.  Right about that time I saw the red lights coming up behind us. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to fake my way out of this one.

The officers were helpful, after receiving a  handful of tickets they followed us back down the road till we found one of our mowers, the other seemed to have disappeared completely.

We called the yard and told them that we had a slight problem on the way back, but everyone was alright and we would be back soon.  I’ve been met with some cold stares and silence before, but man that still stands out in my mind as a memorable day.

Next Monday, we were incredibly still employed. They gave us a truck, about a thousand feet of rubber hose and three thousand feed of wire and sent us to a park to wire up newly planted trees. A couple of the foreman did make stops out that day to see how we were doing.

Needles to say my landscaping career ended soon after that.  But, I did cut the lawn today.