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I’m really looking forward to spring.
Although we haven’t really had severe weather this winter, a little cabin fever is setting in with me.
Maybe it’s because I missed most of last summer, as I was cooped up in the hospital. But I’m ready to plant things in the dirt, to mow grass, to resume my (possibly never ending) exterior painting project. In short, I’m ready for outdoors, for sunshine, for some good old-fashioned manual labor when the workday is through.
I’m already tired of getting up in the dark, going to work as the sun is just beginning to peek over the horizon and going home in the dark. I’m tired of having the winter blahs, just coming home and vegetating in the recliner in front of the television.
Phyllis has been getting a lot of seed and plant catalogues in the mail lately, and has even started herbs in the kitchen windowsill. She’s talking building raised beds and containers for her garden (neither one of us stoops and bends as well as we used to).
Me, I’m just dreaming of having daylight at both ends of a workday again, of tuning up the lawnmower on a bright spring day, of mowing.
Maybe it’s the simplicity of mowing that I like so much. If you can walk upright slowly in a circle or back and forth while guiding a 20-30 pound machine, you can mow. If you can walk like that and guide a 10-pound machine, you can mow with a reel mower — but you have to do it nearly every day and primarily on level ground.
And again this year, I’m wanting to plant some sort of ground cover on Ford Mountain, my steep backyard slope. Yes, the one I mow with a lawnmower attached to a spoonbill rod with duct tape. A flying power mower isn’t the safest thing in the world: in fact, it may have been what killed all of those birds down in Arkansas. And Phyllis won’t let me try that with her reel mower.
So I’m thinking either ground cover or a ton of sand and boulders for a Zen garden. But when it gets down to it, I’ll probably just mow it every week and fuss about it all summer, just like I did in 2001, 02, 03, 04, 05 … well, you get the idea.
I’m really looking forward to spring.
Although we haven’t really had severe weather this winter, a little cabin fever is setting in with me.
Maybe it’s because I missed most of last summer, as I was cooped up in the hospital. But I’m ready to plant things in the dirt, to mow grass, to resume my (possibly never ending) exterior painting project. In short, I’m ready for outdoors, for sunshine, for some good old-fashioned manual labor when the workday is through.
I’m already tired of getting up in the dark, going to work as the sun is just beginning to peek over the horizon and going home in the dark. I’m tired of having the winter blahs, just coming home and vegetating in the recliner in front of the television.
Phyllis has been getting a lot of seed and plant catalogues in the mail lately, and has even started herbs in the kitchen windowsill. She’s talking building raised beds and containers for her garden (neither one of us stoops and bends as well as we used to).
Me, I’m just dreaming of having daylight at both ends of a workday again, of tuning up the lawnmower on a bright spring day, of mowing.
Maybe it’s the simplicity of mowing that I like so much. If you can walk upright slowly in a circle or back and forth while guiding a 20-30 pound machine, you can mow. If you can walk like that and guide a 10-pound machine, you can mow with a reel mower — but you have to do it nearly every day and primarily on level ground.
And again this year, I’m wanting to plant some sort of ground cover on Ford Mountain, my steep backyard slope. Yes, the one I mow with a lawnmower attached to a spoonbill rod with duct tape. A flying power mower isn’t the safest thing in the world: in fact, it may have been what killed all of those birds down in Arkansas. And Phyllis won’t let me try that with her reel mower.
So I’m thinking either ground cover or a ton of sand and boulders for a Zen garden. But when it gets down to it, I’ll probably just mow it every week and fuss about it all summer, just like I did in 2001, 02, 03, 04, 05 … well, you get the idea.
And I’d like to paint the interior of the house before next winter. Maybe a few spring murals would be nice to look at in the winter. This from a guy whose talent lends itself to stick people, irregular lines which are supposed to be mountains and lower-case ms spaced here and there to represent birds. It’s more caveman than Audubon, believe me.
I wait for spring, a season when a middle-aged man’s fancy turns to home improvement and a middle-aged woman’s fancy turns to gardening.
Our “fur kids” — the cats — still prefer Kit and Kaboodle and tuna.
John Ford is managing editor of the Neosho Daily News. He likes to paint, especially with a roller and a four-inch brush, and can mow and chew gum at the same time. E-mail him at jford@neoshodailynews.com.
