Backyard confessional

Purchase of power lawnmower is cause for reflection.

I grew up Catholic. Every few months, starting in 2nd grade, I had to share my most serious sins. I would enter a small room called a confessional, and sometimes I would sit across the desk from a priest. Other times I would choose to go behind the curtain to admit to misdeeds anonymously.

The sins of an 8-year-old are few. Oftentimes, I had to come up with something to say.

“I confess to having said a four-letter word. It was ‘darn.’”

Then I’d go sit in a pew and repent by repeating the “Hail Mary” or “Our Father.”

It’s with this in mind, that I’m writing to admit I recently purchased a power lawn mower. For years, I’d used a Fiskars manual lawnmower, or reel mower, a simple machine whose blades spun only when supplied with sufficient force. And indeed it sometimes required enormous amounts of force, and blood and sweat and sometimes tears to get through the turf that resembled that of Pinehurst #2. Cutting the lawn became a workout and significant time investment, including on the hottest and most humid of days. But I could take pride in the quiet of the mower, the lack of fossil fuel inputs and the thriftiness and self-reliance of a tool that hadn’t changed in 100 or so years.

My new acquisition is a battery-powered mower, the cordless kind that is quieter than a combustion engine and of course doesn’t require gas. It takes about a quarter as long to mow the entire property. Previously I was going over the grass two or three times with the Fiskars. Even then, the lawn didn’t measure up to the aesthetics of most of my neighbors’ and was a little raggedy and uneven. The new look is closely cropped and may make for a good game of bocce or croquet.

America’s fixation on tidy turf lawns, fueled by big box stores, seed companies, and TruGreen, has left homeowners with little choice but to invest in myriad attendant devices. I’ve eschewed most of them until now. I still plan to use an old-fashioned rake for cleaning leaves and a broom for tending to the sidewalk.

I am not sure what my penance should be for buying the power lawnmower other than tending to the native flora that we do have. Instead of an “Our Father,” I could memorize portions of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and recite them. Even so, I feel I’ve crossed a Rubicon in this yardwork journey.

Parting with this Fiskars reel mower was a challenging decision.

Another gentle call for paid subscriptions

Re-posting something I shared Friday…

This newsletter strives to convey the beauty of our avifauna while educating others, providing commentary, and hopefully some entertainment as well.

I struggle with the divide between “free” and “paid” subscribers. I see Substack newsletters—much larger ones than this one—that put most everything behind a paywall. I imagine there’s some financial reward to that; the down side is that the newsletter is accessible to fewer people. That’s at odds with this newsletter’s goal of raising awareness of birds.

I’d like to keep this newsletter free for most subscribers throughout the rest of 2024 and into the future. I’d like to write only “free” posts. Any paid subscribers can certainly help with that goal. If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter, I hope you might become a paid subscriber also. Click here to get started or click the button below.

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