Spring Arrives

Today is March 20, 2017 – the first day of spring. This means I can mow my yard, which has needed mowing for a month. We had a warm February that allowed the grass to grow sufficiently that some of my neighbors mowed their yards a month ago. But I refuse to mow my yard in winter. It’s a little eccentricity that I justify by the fact that I live in central Virginia, not Florida. Virginia has cold winters, despite the occasional mid-winter warm spell (and here I’m thinking of the famous “January thaw”). Winters are a downside to living in Virginia. I have to burn heating oil. I have to wear a coat outside the house. I have to shovel snow. There’s no “fun in the sun” – it’s winter. There should be an upside to winter, and one upside I insist upon is that I don’t have to mow grass. But that changes today.

First, I’ll remove the mower blades from beneath the deck of my lawn tractor and sharpen them. This is necessary because last summer someone placed a brick in tall grass behind my garage. I couldn’t see the brick (tall grass, remember) and consequently I drove my mower over it. The mower blades chewed the brick to bits with a hellacious racket as the pieces of brick churned out by the blades rebounded off the inside of the mower’s deck and back into the blades for further chewing. The mower blades had (past tense) thin, sharp edges and they took quite a beating from the brick. Of course, the mower continued to cut grass. I could put the blades on backward and they would still shorten grass. But the process would be more of a tearing, ripping, and mangling than cleanly cutting the blades of grass. So there’s that.

And I no longer have an excuse to not scrape and paint over peeling paint on my house’s exterior woodwork. And will the window air conditioner that is 22 years old operate for one more summer? And dandelions are sprouting in the yard, and the yard needs fertilizer, and weed killer, and grass seed.

I should be doing yard work right now, but this blog post isn’t going to write itself. Priorities, you know. I can do yard work tomorrow, but there’s only one first day of spring.