A Lighter View
Mowing as a metaphor
By K.E.H. Stagg

June 18, 2009

It’s been said that people’s choice in cars reflects how they view themselves. I don’t know how true that statement is, but I can guarantee that the way they mow their lawns reveals more about them than they might want even their shrink to know!

Take what I call the traditional mowers. Up and back they march across the lawn behind a push mower, cutting swaths of more or less straight lines. They try to match up their lines with the neighbors on either side, and they finish it off with a nice, neat edging. A variation on this theme is the side-to-side mower, the person who makes the straight lines horizontal rather than vertical. They keep the deck on the same setting, not too high that the lawn gets shaggy and overgrown, nor so low that the grass scorches.

And their mowing outfits could almost be a uniform: shorts or jeans in a heavy fabric, t-shirt and sneakers or deck shoes. All of these individuals seem comfortable with the status quo; they’re not going to buck the landscape system by pruning their box hedges into cutesy animal shapes, or planting kumquat trees in the front yard.

Then you have your “green” mowers. They cut diagonal paths across the lawn, varying the angle each week so that the lawn isn’t trodden or mowed in the same direction twice in a row, sort of like farmers who rotate crops each year to keep the earth from being leached of its nutrients. They also vary the deck height from week to week to let the grass recover (or whatever it does between mowings). In this, they resemble those of us who empty the dishwasher by placing the clean dishes on the bottom of the stack so that the same dishes aren’t getting used all the time.

These folks wear cotton, linen or hemp clothing with flip-flops made from recycled rubber. They don’t launder their clothes as often as most, in order to conserve water; and their all-natural laundry soap doubles as a pesticide.

You also have your free-spirit mowers. These people generally get around on lawn tractors, which allows them to twirl around the yard. They don’t try to match up their swaths with the neighbors’; in fact, they don’t cut in a pattern so much as they release the inner landscape, chopping concentric circles or any other pattern that strikes their fancy at the moment. They’re more than likely to be inspired by whatever the iTune of the moment is, which could be anything from “Hotel California” to “Reflections at Red Rock. “ They mow whenever they feel the urge, not because they have to hack their way through the yard with a machete to pick up the morning paper. As for weeds, what weeds? One man’s weed is another man’s flower!

The free spirits appear to jettison the confinements of garments that most of us consider essential, perhaps in deference to the inner child that needs to run free. They tend their lawn equally in business suits and bathing suits, whatever they happen to have on when the mowing bug strikes.

And the revelations just keep coming. I foresee personality tests profiling an individual as a “low deck/straight line/edger” or a “high deck/no fertilizer” instead of a “Type A” or a “high C.”

If I had known before that mowing the lawn revealed so much about my personality, artificial turf might have been the way to go!