RIP for My Riding Lawn Mower

More than just a mechanical goat …

My 25-year old riding lawn mower died last week right in the middle of … well … mowing my yard. My yard has a slight incline (ever so slight, you barely notice it when you’re playing football or baseball, soccer, or kickball out there) but I was mowing up the incline when the mower stopped moving forward and a high shrill/grinding noise appeared from below (me). After doing some research and coming to the conclusion that it would take me about seven years to fix via YouTube videos, I talked with my neighbor / expert lawn mower repair person (he’s fixed something like 70 mowers over the years). He said that no, I didn’t have a squirrel sitting behind the air filter, lamenting his woes. Instead, I had a back trans-axle that was broken or severely impeded. He said that the cost to fix was too prohibitive to even think about — even if we could get the parts and do the work ourselves — and I should plan on the mower’s demise.

My first thought was, well, I could just park it in the woods. After all, we have a couple of acres of trees where I could hide it nicely. The woods serve well as a hide-and-seek playground and/or paintball retinue and, after all, isn’t putting a vehicle in your woods a kind of southern thing to do? Come to think of it, I see cars in the woods in most states I drive through, with the exception of Iowa and Nebraska, which don’t have trees (actually that’s a misconception … I read somewhere (NU alum magazine I think) that Nebraska has the largest amount of “natural forest” land of any state. And that may be not quite the term for it — there probably is an added requirement or two, like: forest land for educational/research use, or forests where buffalo formerly roamed, or something. Maybe it has the most forests for states whose university has won over 800 games in its duration, or something) or Silicon Valley, also barren of trees (okay, I’m just kidding there too. I tend to think of California as being one giant interstate, but I know that’s not the case).

Anyway, I was saying that my mower consultant says it’s time for a new mower (or I can hire someone to mow, etc., but THAT’s not gonna work because the gardener in our family — I mean the Chief Gardener — has numerous restrictions on what needs to be, or can be, cut in any proximity to the garden. ‘

Thus, and thusly say I unto thee (which sounds like Ring Lardner, but I don’t think that’s quite right … it wasn’t Monty Python either … or maybe it was, in the Holy Hand Grenade sketch. I don’t know).

So … I’m in the market for a mower, preferrably a new mower because technologies are still changing at a fairly rapid clip. My yard has developed a number of beds of plants and trees and stuff, and I’ve been mowing around them and backing up and hitting corners again and going around things and, eventually, it has some to the point where I make something like 4753 turns of the steering wheel just to get the yard decently mowed. That’s including both forward and backward mowing.

We’re liking the looks of these “zero degree” turning mowers. They’re a bit pricy but the prices may come down. Fortunately, we’re approaching winter. Normally my last mowing is early December. But if the last mowing happened last week, that’s not so bad. Our grass has slowed down growing, so it may be okay to keep it as is.

Or feel free to drive by my house and laugh at how long the grass might be. Stop in and we can have some hot chocolate. Or maybe I can sell you a book.

Have a great day, all, and remember: TODAY IS MONDAY.

Now go out there and get ’em.

Cheers,
me

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