Making meaning from mowing the grass

Freshly mowed grass is a smell that can put me back in a Dodgers t-shirt jersey and baseball pants. That was my coach pitch team when I was 8 and after a game, there was no point in changing clothes before running out into the summer evening. I’d ditch my long socks (hiked up like Chipper Jones) because I hated the way the clumps of grass from the mower stuck to it.

And I’d hear the cicadas and the distant sound of my mother on the mower on the other side of the house, and I’d feel the grass cooling underneath my feet as the sky faded to indigo and I’d hear my mother speed up the mower so she could finish before it got dark because an unfinished task to my mother is tantamount to sin.

Now, I mow my own grass. My neighbor Dan said he’d mow my yard for cheap, but I said no, I wanted to do it myself.

When he asked, I didn’t have conscious thoughts in my head, I just know I want to my yard.

Maybe I like the feeling of finishing and sitting down in the camping chair in my garage to survey my work and call it good. Maybe I’m a 21st Century Man whose life’s work is on hard drives and servers and I just need to see some fruit. Or maybe I just love the smell of fresh cut grass.

The temptation with writing about my ordinary life on Substack is to create some meaning for you out of everything I do. Preachers love to do this: every happening is a sermon illustration, every moment is a teachable moment with a positive message they can tie to a passage in 1 Corinthians.

Before I’m too hard on preachers, writers are worse: we either a) think our lives are so interesting that we need to share them with you or b) treat every moment as an illustration for why everything is terrible and a reminder that someday we’re all going to die.

But sometimes I just like mowing the grass because the way it smells.