Lawns

Ah.  Just came in from mowing my back yard lawn.  Yikes!  Too many holes made it nearly impossible to walk and maneuver the mower.  Got me to thinking -- where do they come from?  Moles and voles?  Skunks?  When my husband tended the lawn and the dogs were alive, the holes were very few and small and the ground level.  Now, some are nearly as round as a small ball like the one you play catch with your children.  The awful thing about all this is that after my husband died, I hired someone to keep up the lawn.  He worked at keeping the ground level, the holes under control, and the weeds at a minimum, and the lawn flourished again.  Soon, though, his son, who did the mowing, graduated from high school and his wife felt he should just be working on their yard.

Since then, various people have mowed this lawn, including me, periodically, but it has fallen into a sad state.  Every year, I've added new soil, weeded, fed, and tried to keep the lawn looking like it once did when my husband tended it.  Alas, it has defeated me.  Tonight, I thought I would never get it mowed, the ground was so uneven, the weeds so strong and high.  Even after weed whacking, the mower didn't always succeed in bringing some weeds to their roots.  Sigh.

I'm so glad I had a massage today.  My back is screaming and my hands hurt from the vibrations from the weed whacker and the mower.  Maybe I should let my lawn grow wild and not give it another thought -- that is, until I look out my kitchen window and see the weeds rising above the grass, mocking me!  Sigh.