Here in the U.S. of A the pace of life is fast with little time to stop & smell those flowers.
Our professionals work 40-hour workweeks in general, and in some cases, quite a bit more.
- We don't take mid-day siestas (We should! I subscribe to the school of thought that a nap in the middle of the day helps you be more productive. Plus then we'd get pillows, and I love pillows).
- We don't have 32 hour work weeks with wonderful 3-day weekends (damn you Europe!).
- Everything must be bigger/better/stronger/smaller/faster/cheaper/sexier/racier/newer/MORE
Exercise is my best example. Do I want a nice toned body sleek with muscles and berefit of any jiggling except in acceptable areas? Of course!
But after diligently exercising for an entire SIX WEEKS (years ago) what did I get for all of my sweaty, hard, and expensive work?
Nada. Oh sure, maybe the Big B said my arse was growing firmer but that wasn't enough for me. I wanted VISIBLE results! Results I could see, feel, admire. So I stopped going to the gym, which is sad because clearly I was close to obtaining those results, but my instant-demanding self wasn't satisfied.
I continued paying the "fat tax" aka Gym Dues for several months, with occasional visits whenever I was inspired to actually use the facilities I was paying for.
Luckily, life is full of things you can do that provide that instant gratification of a job well done. Activities like ironing, dusting, vacuuming a very hairy carpet, shaving your legs, raking leaves, and mowing the lawn.
Ahh......mowing the lawn!
This past weekend was the first time I got the pleasure of mowing the entire lawn All By Myself. Previously, this duty was relegated to the Big B by dint of his manliness and the fact that I have no problem playing the male card when it suits me. However, we both realized that while our self-propelled push lawnmower is excellent as far as lawn-mowers go, the Big B would not be able to do this yard duty for some time yet.
Thus. I ended up pushing that wonderful machine around our little corner lot. Previously I had always scoffed at the Big B's insistance that we have a big lawn. I grew up on a lot that was a couple of acres, and my BFF down the road lived on 40 more, so to me these little postage stamp-sized lawns were hardly worth of the title "yard".
I was a bit daunted as the Big B showed me how to prime the motor, then pull the cord to start the engine. I was happily surprised when it started after only a few pulls, because my puny arm strength in the past had been no match for appliances requiring a pull-start.
But as I pushed the whirling blades around the yard while dodging the tulips that survived last year's mowing massacre I found that while this was definitely WORK, I was enjoying it.
I liked placing the wheels precisely in the rut of the previously mowed row so that no errant blade of grass would escape uncut. I enjoyed seeing how neat the cut grass looked and how easy it was to see where I hadn't mowed yet and where I had.
I delighted in the fact that although last year when this was his job he callously mowed down our pretty flowers, since I'm the one doing it this year, I could make sure that the tulips, peonies and other perennials would survive with leaves intact throughout the summer.
I may have been a bit overzealous initially as I weaved and dodged around the haphazardly placed flowers, as a blister soon developed from my frenetic wheeling and turning.
That was okay, however, as I found a way to avoid adding additional punishment on to the tenderized skin when I moved to the front yard. There, I got to delight in mowing around and around the yard in a big wiggly circle until I was finally done.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Sweet satisfaction.
Until I realized that the Big B had been overzealous with the weed wacker and had attacked some tulips near the fence that I had made a point of sparing in my earlier sweeps.
WTF? How does this man not recognize tulip plants when he sees them?!?
I grabbed the poor, broken and dismembered leaves from their grave by the neighbor's fence and held them up accusingly between us. He tries to tell me he thought they were weeds. I drag him to another part of the yard where other plants had been spared and tried to point out how the leaves were THE SAME.
"How do you know they're tulips?" he says, an impish grin threatening to break out on his face and a mischievious glint in his eyes telling me he's messing with me deliberately to push my buttons.
I throw my hands up, exasperated, and stalk off after it becomes clear that the man is hopeless when it comes to plants. This had been shown to me earlier when we were halfheartedly weeding one of the many small gardens littering our backyard, but I guess I didn't want to admit that my hubby has chloro-phobia. I was earnestly pulling up weeds while he watched and when I went to grab a particularly large one, he stops me to say, "Are you sure that's a weed?!" all concerned-like.
I had to stop in disbelief, as the weed I was pulling was the same as the ones I had already pulled, just larger. "You really can't tell the difference?" I asked, incredulous. Apparently, he couldn't.
My man is color-blind when it comes to living, green things.
*sigh*
Apparently, he's excellent at telling a gray squirrel chitter from a red squirrel chitter. Maybe he was trying to prove that his city-boy upbringing wasn't as derelict when it came to flora and fauna as I thought.
I can't believe it, not even for a second, especially coming from a man who didn't know that this was a canadian goose.
"What do you call it then?" I ask, dreading the answer.
"A goose, what else!"
I give up. He's hopeless, but it's part of his charm.
No comments:
Post a Comment