Christmas Lights and Lawn Mowers

While everyone else in the neighborhood is out hanging Christmas lights I’m doing yardwork. They’re all hoping for snow and I’m praying for a few more days of sunshine to dry out the lawn so I can mow one more time. Now mind you, I’m not the guy down the street with jack-o-lanterns wilting on his porch or those dreadful pumpkin garbage bags sitting in the front lawn – but I was starting to feel like that was all I was missing. Nothing shatters the picture-perfect holiday-looking house like two-foot tendrils of uncut bushes poking out from under a picturesque blanket of snow. Or a freshly shoveled walk with all the half-rotted frozen leaves upturned by the snow shovel now sitting on top of the otherwise white Christmas-postcard landscape. Not this year! December 3rd in normally frozen Indiana, God willing, the noise polluting growl of a lawn-mower will ring out in my neighborhood once more. While other mowers sit snugly in their winter garage-beds, dreams of spring dandelions floating in their cylinders, my lawn-boy will be chewing into six-inch semi-wet bent-over leaf-ridden blades of grass. Yeah, baby! Those who cut last have the neatest trimmed yards when the snow melts next spring. Pumpkin-dude, eat your heart out!