A neighbor recently gave me perhaps the greatest compliment found in the vocabulary of the suburban American male: “Geez, man” — shaking his head with eyebrows raised and eyes wide — “Your lawn looks great. It’s really green —”
I interrupted him with a smile. “Greener than a golf course.”
There’s no place for modesty here. Humblebrags are for people you don’t know well. Me and my neighbor Tom — or is his name Bill? — are the best of friends, so we don’t bridle the ego when it comes to lawn care.
It’s that time of year when days are filled with the sound of buzzing mowers and the smell of freshly cut grass. I learned to love this summer combination as a teenager stretched behind a push mower that spat clippings out the side as it went. What began as a chore became the door to freedom: If I got up early and mowed and raked the lawn without having to be asked, I knew I’d be able to hang out with my friends that night and maybe use the car. Along the way, I discovered pride in the doing. My mowing lines had to be perfectly straight, leaving behind a striped pattern in the grass that was the envy of the block.
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Even now, as age 50 approaches, I still enjoy mowing the lawn. In a world of keyboards and video conferencing and artificial light, lawnmowing is where I get to commune with nature and get my hands dirty, break a sweat, do some “real” work. It is sometimes hard to see the difference you make in the world, but lawn care provides immediate feedback, as is often the case with jobs that require you to shower after work instead of before.
Follow this authorTheodore R. Johnson's opinionsAnd the “being outside” has a social importance: It announces your presence, marks your place. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that roughly 98 percent of what I know about my neighbors was learned while mowing the lawn. For example, I know my good buddy Bill — no, his name is Tom. John? — had a cool vacation out West a couple years ago. I get updates on his adult kids and know his favorite college football teams. We trade stories about the ways we grew up. The truth is, I wouldn’t even know ol’ What’s His Face’s name if not for conversations that happen while out mowing the lawn.
Another neighbor who lives behind us stopped his car to catch up while I was crisscrossing the yard the other day. I’ve only seen him a handful of times. He stops by once a year after the lawnmowing season is well underway. The first time, we traded pleasantries and then he motioned at my yard with one hand like older Southern men do and said, “I’ve seen you out here going back and forth, back and forth. If you want, I know a guy —” And then he stopped himself, eyed the HBCU license plate on my car and the fraternity frame around it, and lapsed into the mother tongue: “Man, my boy could take care of all this.” I told him the lawn is my little sanctuary and he understood. Before we returned to the world of American suburbia, he looked me in the eye and said, “Aight now. Just wanted you to know that we out here.” And I understood.
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Retired Adm. William H. McRaven gave a commencement speech that was so popular he developed it into a best-selling book. Changing the world, he argued, starts with one simple act. “If you make your bed every morning,” he said, “you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.” Mowing the lawn is like making your bed in public. There is a pride in the task knowing that it’s the first thing people will see. It’s a public assertion of one’s ability to manage and care for a home — property that is most people’s single biggest investment and thereby the Holy Grail of the American Dream. “A man,” as my granddaddy would say, “needs some land to walk.”
And just as beds are inspected in the military, the status of one’s lawn is assessed by passersby. A grossly overgrown and severely neglected lawn makes people wonder, “Who are they? What’s going on over there?” An ostentatious and obsessively manicured yard produces a subtly different reaction: “What’s going on over there? Who do they think they are?” The writer Caitlin Flanagan observed, “In Minnesota, a shoveled driveway is both a winter necessity and an unmistakable sign to the community: We are okay in this house.” My father grew up in Jim Crow South Carolina, and for him (and, as such, for me), a beautiful lawn is a mark of success as well as an implicit assertion in a mostly White neighborhood: We are okay in this house … and you are safe in yours. In the American suburbs, lawn care is both symbol and performance.
I heard somewhere that people in the middle class pay for things they used to do personally and personally do the things they used to pay for. The example, I think, was that people used to pay travel agents to book trips and mowed the lawn themselves. Now, they pay someone to mow their lawn and book travel themselves. Hiring people to do things in your house that you don’t want to do is its own luxury. And “knowing a guy” is its own social marker, a working-class attribute that’s a more personal and reliable version of LinkedIn. Still, the more our society monetizes every aspect of life, to include the empty seats in our cars and the empty beds in our houses, the more necessary it is to undertake work for the pleasure and dignity of the work itself. Our only relationship to work cannot be as a cog in a financial machine. Work can provide purpose, little or large, separate from the dollar.
As I get older, allergies to grass pollens can make the aftermath of an afternoon communing with the lawn a bit of a struggle. But it’ll take more than that to chase me into the house. I’d miss my best bud Tom. Wait — Will! I think?
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