Summertime

"Summer time, and the livin' is easy."

- Ira Gershwin / George Gershwin / Du Bose Heyward / Dorothy Heyward

Clearly the four people it took to come up with that iconic lyric had others doing their household work for them. Summer has it uses: hammocks, swimming pools, baseball (if you're not a Pirates fan that is, if you are then that's just a sad part of the season), ice cream stands. For me, it's a time when as a superstitious, ritual driven sports fan, I can choose whatever coffee mug I want because I don't have to plan it around "game day mugs". Of course that means there are no game days, so a bit of a double-edge sword there. But as a homeowner, it's anything but easy. And as an aging homeowner, summer will tell you a lot about where you truly are in your life.

For instance, when I just passively look at my yard, it's a slightly larger than average suburban yard on a gentle slope. When I'm mowing my yard, it's an estate built into the side of a mountainous incline. Want to watch a grandmother cuss like a sailor? Come watch me mow. I need to remember that the neighbors to the right of us have a toddler now and police myself, but the more tired and frustrated I get, the more the four letter descriptives about the work at hand come out.

Looks gentle, right? Yeah, right,

It's fair to ask why don't you just hire someone to mow it. There are choices one makes when supporting an aging adult completely, and our lawn service was one of the first luxuries to go (it helped that they stopped showing up regularly).  If you ask me to choose between going to a handful of hockey games or having the ease of someone else doing my yard, hockey wins every time.  But there will come a point where it's not a choice I get to make.  Our bodies will make it for us.  At one point last summer, hot, filthy, sweaty and smelly, feeling like I'd just come through the Battle of the Bastards (okay, maybe that's being slightly overdramatic), I looked at my husband and asked if we're there yet. But we're not there yet because there is the undeniable fact that if you're trying to stay active, mowing is a great way to get your steps in without ever leaving home. 

When I went through my COVID-let's-get-in-shape year, I insisted I do the mowing for that reason.  It wasn't pretty, I was hating it and myself every weekend, and the hubs made a lot of fun of me for how slow I would go, but I could get the whole yard done in a single session (with some notable breaks where I would look busy pulling weeds or trimming but was really just trying to recuperate a bit). After that summer we would split it from one week to another.  But this year, he's the one in the get-in-shape mode so he wants to do it, but he's tempering how he goes now.  Front yard one day. Backyard the next.  Rome wasn't built in a day. Our yard isn't mowed in one either.  Seems to be working better than my foul-mouthed all-out assault.

The family on the other side of us are also young parents, but their kids are a bit older and heavily into organized sports, so in true Yinzer fashion, their extended family steps in to help take care of things, and one of the dads (so roughly our age) does their mowing, and I notice he does the same thing now.  He can't make the whole yard in a single day (and it's smaller than ours but also with a deceiving slope). I saw him from my office window the other day walking up their front steps after he'd done half the front.  I thought the poor man was about to have a coronary right in front of my eyes.  In all candor, it's not age as much as he's got the beer drinker's paunch and could definitely stand to lose even more than I could, which is a fair amount.  Sorry if that sounds mean, but the truth sometimes packs a sting - a different kind of pack than we used to carry around on NFL Sundays, sadly.

That day, maybe the next, I was walking Carly in an affluent neighborhood not far from ours.  I love walking there, looking at the lovely old houses and their carefully manicured lawns and lavish gardens.  Some of those yards could fit two of ours on them with room to spare.  And as we walked past one such there was a man, roughly a decade older, painfully bent over walking his push mower slowly up and back, up and....oh-so-slowly...back.  I stopped by his house today and looked: his slope kicks my slope in the butt.  That's a hard yard to mow with a push-mower no matter who you are.

He clearly has some money or he couldn't afford the taxes on a lot like that, and our neighbor's family could pool together funds and just hire a lawn service for my neighbor. Why do we all continue to oh-so-painfully work that hard at something that I am willing to bet gives none of us joy at this stage in life.  I certainly don't see ecstasy on any of our faces when mowing.  I've decided it's because we just can't give in yet.  It would be admitting we're not the young, vibrant, capable homeowners who dreamed of how it would be to pamper our very own yards and groom them and put the stamp of our nurturing care on them.  We were the Kings and Queens of our castles and thought we always would be. We're not ready to step down from that throne. Even if, strictly speaking, being royalty means we would have people doing our dirty work...sometimes my logic is flawed, but you get the point, right? A lot about aging, I've decided, is about the battle for control.  And this is a big one.  And it's a bastard. So maybe I wasn't being overly dramatic before after all.