askyermom

The Mayor lives on my street, which is helpful most of the time. She is not actually the mayor, but I call her The Mayor because that is her vibe. A regular person doesn’t drag a soapbox around and give speeches about garbage; no, that’s a very mayoral thing to do.

Most of the time when I speak to The Mayor, I learn new and interesting details. She was the one who told me that my neighbor with dementia is putting out poison for dogs.

This is not impossible, but I like to think she is not actually doing any evil. It’s easy enough to avoid Dementia Dame’s yard. While she may not be evil, she is confusing. She puts up big signs that say “Absolutely No Trespassing” inside her fence and then she decorates the yard in her own sort of holiday scheme. It’s like the Nightmare before Fourth of July. Glow in the dark trees, fairly lights and flags. The kicker is the new Lemonade banner she put up which clashes very hard with the trespassing warnings and all the dead grass. Do we go in expecting lemonade with all the signals we have received? No, we do not.

Last week, The Mayor was very irritated by a little festival in the field. They may or may not have had a permit and they may or may not have left bags of human waste under a tree. Simply imagining the goofiness required to skimp on porta potties for scores of party goers leads me to believe the planners were not parents. All parents have a potty first mentality that is unshakable.

During the festival chat with The Mayor, she let me know that she has an informant in the code department and she can slap citations around if she gets fed up. She had just recently complained unofficially about a neighbor’s tall grass and presto the grass was cut the next day.

I didn’t argue with her perceived power, but the grass gets cut eventually no matter what. Our best Mowing Samaritan moved away, but generally people have a way of covering for the neighbors who struggle to get their mowing done, it’s just not always working out in time to avoid her ire.

I knew I was in trouble before she made this tall grass observation, which was definitely pointed at me. I knew because my grass was the tallest on the block, and because a mowing pro was pounding on my door every day, and every day I ignored him. The mowing people want $2/minute to mow my yard and I cannot face it, even while tempting mayoral fury.

I’ve been meaning to ask Jack of All Details how much he’d charge for my yard, but he has seemed lost in grim meditations the last two times I spotted him. He’s actually a medical person who no doubt does something that requires close attention to details. Maybe a pharmacist. Maybe not. Do pharmacists do odd jobs these days?

You may not be wondering what the neighbors call me, but I’ll tell you my best guesses anyway. I’m pretty sure they refer to me as the Tofu Lady, even if they are not exactly sure why. It’s a natural nickname, since most days children shriek ‘TOFU!!” when they see me, because of the dog. I am also fairly certain that the neighborhood teens think of me as the Tofu Witch, and this is why no one mows for me and why they slink through my side yard looking guilty, even after I told them it’s a free path.

After the mayoral warning and scanning carefully to determine that yes, I had the tallest grass on both sides of the block, I did the second most reasonable thing and left town for several days. When I returned, even the knocking mower guy had stopped trying to get my business. I had taken so long that the grass in the back was over a foot high.

After a few days of procrastinating even further, I saddled up for an early morning mow. The grass was too tall and too wet, and if I had not reached maximum exasperation with the whole thing, I would have realized mowing that morning was a bad idea.

My back lawn is the size of a parking space for two compact cars. I don’t know what it is in feet or meters, but it’s small, comically so. If you set a large bucket of water in the center and dropped a cantaloupe from a height of, let’s say, five feet, the whole yard would get wet.

So, reasoning that while it was tall it was not broad and not a very big job, I mowed anyway, and the mower groaned and nearly bogged several times before it actually jammed. I rolled it to the pavement and gave it the careless gravity wallop that had always worked before. It did not respond to this treatment. This time there was smoke and a terrible rubber smell. It seemed like a good idea to get the mower away from anything I didn’t want to light on fire, just in case.

I know better than to reach under a jammed mower. I once knew a woman who lost the end of her finger doing just that. This is just more proof that if you live long enough, you will know people who have been maimed in a great many different ways. I unplugged the mower and flipped it up onto the fence to get a better look. Fearing both electrocution and finger loss, I used a plastic tool to free the blades. The mower spat out a baseball sized chunk of wet grass.

Then for no reason, I used my hose to wash the underside of the mower, freeing more great gobs of grass. Then I stopped to think, maybe introducing water to a motor that I had just insulted was not my greatest idea. Probably, I hadn’t shot too much water into those venty looking things–certainly not a cantaloupe’s worth–but I was worried.

I have rare moments when I really feel my profound incompetence and this was one of them. This was why I didn’t want a mower or grass or any of it. How can I ever be in charge of anything?

I am just one little brain in the wilderness.

This thought immediately consoled me. I can’t be expected to be an expert yard person and mechanic and everything else. On my own I am a barely adequate yard person and that’s okay.

The rabbits like my yard and I always know which invasive weeds are going to bother The Mayor next, because I have them. Next time I see her, we’ll talk about the wild grapes.

Love,
yermom

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