The Sound of a Lawn Mower

I now live in a Townhouse complex and our gardeners arrive once a week to make everything look ‘Spivey’. They do a fantastic job, with their gas powered mowers, gas powered weed trimmers AND (noisiest of all) the gas powered leaf blowers. So different from ‘back when’ most yards had the houses built close to the roads and usually had back alleys for residents to drive their vehicles down and into their garage behind the house. As well, everyone had a garden in their back yard, which left only a small front yard for a lawn. Regardless of the size of the lawn, there were no gas powered mowers, weed trimmers, edgers OR leaf blowers. In the spring, you took your push mower out of storage, sharpened the blade and oiled the wheels and away you went – no need to change a spark plug, put in fresh gas and start pulling on a cord “silently praying that it is going to start’ – and when it doesn’t start, muttering a few choice words, and every couple of minutes having to assure your wife that you are ‘not going to have a heart attack’, and then start pulling the damn cord again. You can still buy a push mower today, but I have not seen one being used for a long time. The “clatter clatter” of the push mower was so much quieter than the noise that was being made by our gardeners today, mind you being awaken from a nap (newly retired, remember) may have made these gas guzzling, noise machines sound even louder. Again, in days of yore, once finished mowing the small patch of lawn, you would sweep (with a noiseless broom) any offending pieces of grass off the walk, use some clippers to trim the edges – and anyone in the house (perhaps newly retired) could sleep right through the whole process. When you needed a ‘weed whacker’ out would come the scythe, either a two handed version for large areas, or the one handed version for small areas. The secret of using these tools was not by brute force (that the noisy gas guzzlers can exert) but by keeping them very sharp. Normally if you saw someone using a scythe for a large area of grass and/or hay, you would see a sharpening device sticking out of their back pocket. The small hand held scythe is called a sickle, which I remember using along fence lines, etc. but I never did master the scythe. The gardeners have left the complex for this week – back to my nap (newly retired, remember).