My New Red Convertible.

I am the luckiest girl.  The first wedding gift my husband gave me was a shiny new red convertible.   It is one sexy machine, a true sports vehicle.  Unfortunately, it only goes 10 miles per hour.   My shiny new convertible is actually a tractor. 

Today I took my tractor, or as I like to refer to it as my “mobile tanning booth”, for a spin around the lawn to cut the grass.  I thought it would be easy.  I’ve mowed lawns before, used to do it all time back home where I grew up.  I pushed the mower around our less than a quarter acre lot and in short order you were done.  I’ve even worked with the non-gas, non-electric manual mower – for smaller yards, easy-peasy.  Where your cut was easily defined by the green lumps of grass behind you.   Today’s undertaking was not so simple.

After living ten years in Los Angeles I needed some space.  I was tired of being able to peer into my neighbor’s 1.5 million dollar townhouse only to see what they were watching and what they were eating for dinner.  In South Bay (beach cities in LA), you are not guaranteed privacy with a million dollars.  With so many people on top of me for so many years I was excited and anxious about a new city, a new home and some privacy, peace and quiet.  When my husband and I started looking for our new home, he showed me homes closer to the city, on city lots or smaller.  It was not as bad as LA, but it definitely wasn’t what I was looking for.  That’s when he took me a little farther out to the rural community we live in now.   With just over 2 acres of land, I feel I have the privacy and space I need and more grass than a Grateful Dead show.

The space is great, but with space comes the responsibility for upkeep, hence the tractor.  So with best of intentions, I fired that baby up and started to mow….and mow….and mow some more.  Quickly realizing I wasn’t sure if the spot I was doing was done before or not.  We have a lot of trees and landscaping and I soon realized I sort of got lost in my own back yard.  My convertible has a cup holder, but not a GPS, so I went it circles for a little while, missing spots, doing spots three or four times, but just over an hour later I was done.  I couldn’t help but hum the theme song to Green Acres.

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