Bunny 2020

This bunny is in its Eden. Always as the sun sets, a couple of bunnies enjoy dining on the part of the lawn kept mown. The day had been one of those stunningly blue and temperate June days (I think today is another). For a while this property was low on bunnies, but this year young ones were born, too young to know enough to run away from me. They grew up. So I know bunnies are thriving as they should. The second bunny ran as I approached, so this one looks lonely, but I assure you it isn't.

These Rocks Speak Dust

This is what 1000 pounds  or $130 worth of gravel looks like after I made a path to the road. The planned task is not complete but a spare $130 it will bring it closer to finishing.

Wore a breathing mask when I poured this last 360 lbs. Hosed the rocks to keep the dust down. Still inhaled some gravel dust, but less than before, and this time was further educated when I saw the coating of gravel dust over the car. The whole car, back to front, a thin even coating. I understood the nature of this dust now. These rocks speak dust. And feeling gritty all over meant I should shower it off right away and wash the clothes.

This project hallowed this June that slipped away so quickly, and will recall this hallowed month whenever I look at it.

I Travel for Gravel

Before

240 pounds later

The gravel apron in front of the Divine Cabin over the years has been scraped and washed away and grass grows there now hiding ticks and chiggers that bite me, and for four years we have asked the landlord for fresh gravel, because the road needs some too, but it never came. In despair I phoned the gravel mine and they'd deliver a cubic yard for $215, $75 of that delivery charge, and dump-truck the gravel in a pile as tall as I and I'd have to hire someone with a spreader or spend years spreading it shovelful by shovelful, alone.

So every summer more bugs bit me and I didn't even have to go into the woods but simply step outside. Mowing helped, but now I haven't a mower and have asked the landlord to supply one as the lease requires. They don't want to. Phoning mowing professionals got me estimates I felt ashamed I could not pay.

It occurred to me, in my misery, to buy and spread my own gravel and choke off the grass, solving at once the chigger and the mowing and the apron problem, and went to Home Depot, a 30-mile round trip, because they would load my car for me, and bought 8 bags of 30 lbs. each for a total of $31. I thought it was named "Viagra stone" (a dirty mind is a perennial resource). Said nothing of this to the teenager dragging the 240-lb. cart out to my car and loading it, as I could not. As an employee he may not take a tip. But I said, "You're not taking it; I'm giving it," and dropped money in his apron pocket.

Doesn't it look like Viagra stone?

With my own labor I could buy five more such loads before hitting $215. Hefting each bag I dropped them at strategic intervals on the apron, slit the bags, dumped and raked a while and was pleased as heck with my result but there was much more apron to cover.

Now I had big plans. About to return to Home Depot to reload I thought to try the nearby Walmart. An elderly employee said to go to the checkout if I wanted their bags of gravel, but the garden area checkout, at 8 p.m., was closed, and the young employee said he did not work in this section and could not cashier, so I just went home.

I thought it would amuse me to shop at every gravel-selling retail around here and score them on how well I was served. My work on the apron is satisfying as a long-lasting solution to a frustrating, expensive problem.

Now I Ask You Very Confidentially,

Ain't he nice? Patrick's mowed my lawn now twice. He does it to perfection, doesn't cut any corners on these complicated, sloping grounds, uses a weed trimmer for those hard-to-reach places like beneath the hickory tree's hanging branches and around the satellite post, and today brought me a bag of blackberries picked on his farm. The bluebirds love him. Bluebirds can hunt only in short grass because they eat by pinning their insect or worm prey to the earth. Patrick is my neighbor's son, and he mows her lawn too, although mine's the bigger job, about an acre. He said next time he will bring along his own son.

Who Was Here? What Did He Eat? Did It Taste Real Good?

Someone with a picky appetite dined here on the concrete block right in front of the propane tank, dining on a nice fresh lawn mushroom, but didn't finish it, and instead of just leaving it nice on the plate, flang it hither and yon. Probably a frustrated squirrel, from the mess of it, and it's pretty clear that raw mushroom is not his favorite meal. That's just too darn bad. It's going to have to eat what the rest of us eat, or it will be sent to bed without supper--or it will be shot, depending on my mood.

Wild in the Lawn

Unable to mow the lawn right now, but why would I mow anyway, when what grew up is this riot of orange wild daylilies (also called "ditch lilies" and "junk lilies"), brown-eyed susans, and fleabane. It's better than a botanical garden, because it's 100 percent natural. A metropolis for bugs, bunnies, chipmunks, snakes and all kinds of birds in the corner of my yard. And all I had to do was -- nothing. Let that be a lesson to me.

Each lily blooms for only one day. Let that be a lesson too!

Crazy Like a Lawnmower, Part 2

Honestly, my dad didn’t sire a moron. It’s just that he never asked me or any of his other kids, all daughters, to do the mowing, nor did he show us how. He would have been ashamed, my mother says, for the neighbors to see teenage girls doing a man’s job.

Then I grew up and had landlords, and then a boyfriend. A true friend is one who will 1) mow your lawn and 2) help you move house.

Well, you learn something new every day, so I guessed my mower wouldn’t start in the middle of the grass because it WASN’T GETTING ENOUGH AIR in its CHOKE, and sure enough it started up roaring after it was back on the asphalt, and I felt like a genius. I knew about the CHOKE because 30 years ago I regularly drove a ’64 Chrysler that wouldn’t start unless I put my finger down its choke.

The Divine lawn has five sections, three of them sloped. Beginning the mowing on a slope was a mistake.

Certain bare patches were thick with dry oak leaves matted up like corrugated cardboard. Boldly mowing right through them spawned a ferocious dust storm. After several of those, the mower quit, and I guessed at once that I had abused its air filter. The filter sits on the top of the mower, in a closed and fitted black plastic case, and I still can’t see how air ever gets in there. But after securing a dime to unscrew its top I got mentally lost in the beauty of the coin, and in the many reasons why I admire FDR, and then in contemplating, really for the first time, the torch and plants on the coin’s reverse. Then I removed the top of the case and rinsed out the air filter. I left it to dry in the sun on top of the pumphouse and quit for the day.

A pow’ful ornery attack of hay fever laid me out flat the next day, and that’s why there aren’t any Rugged Rural Missouri blog entries between May 19 and June 2. My mowing ensemble had included sturdy shoes and protective eyewear (“eyewear”? What a word!) but not a breathing mask. God, how stupid I was two weeks ago compared to how smart I am today.

Crazy Like a Lawnmower, Part I

My power lawnmower is nothing unusual, 3.5 hp, except that it is too small to mow the whole acre of lawn grass. I am not unusual except that I am a U.S. citizen totally clueless about mowing a lawn.

Firstly I decided to mow only half the acre. Problem 50 percent solved. I put off the job as long as possible, hoping it might rain every day, or at least every other day. God obliged with the third-wettest spring in 130 years. Problem solved for all of April and half of May.

In mid-May I had four-inch grass and knee-high weeds full of ticks jumping from stem to stem like my lawn was their jungle gym. I knew that mowers used gasoline, but had no idea how much. I was a real pantywaist about pumping the gas into a 5-gallon can, terrified and flinching and doing it one drop at a time. But I muddled through, telling myself that the gas was probably more scared of me than I was of it.

Then in the driveway I had my first close-up look at the mower. What a relief to see that the machine had idiot graphics that showed where to put in the gas and oil. I did know how to prime the machine with three jabs at the red rubber button, and to yank that cable “straight from the shoulder, just like a baseball pitch only in reverse.” But it took a while to realize that I shouldn’t pull the lawnmower out into the center of the lawn and try to start it there.

Honestly and truly, my father did not sire a moron. . .