Yes, I don’t have to post this, and as Der Bingle and Quentin pointed out in a 3-way telephone chat, “log” is not really the correct word. Really, I didn’t have to tell them; I was alone when it happened. But it seemed like such a good story . . .

I had mowed for hours and decided to put in 10 more minutes and clean up some scruffy spots when I got too close to a ditch-like area in which tall grass was hiding a pine branch, oh, about the size of a man’s arm. IT HAPPENED SO FAST!

I was stuck but managed to get moving and drove the mower into the garage with about 8 inches of log sticking out. Good thing the garage area was wide enough. Do you know I once carried a dog with his leg in a cast through a doorway the wrong way and there was a THUD?
And today I backed into the new berm/mound and bent one of the reflectors Der Bingle had put up just for me. Go ahead and think it: pathetic.

Anyway, it was the newish mower – the shiny mower. I guess I am going to have to call the folks at Crystal Valley and have them come and pick it up – along with the older, not so shiny one that won’t start. That would be the one I got too close to a fallen tree on and managed to get the blade to punch right through the cover. I wrote about that last summer, but I’m not linking to it. I’m too hang-dog to link.

As penance I am going to make myself clean up the old Lawn-Boy, study up on the oil/gas mixture and actually start p-u-s-h-i-n-g. It’s not like the little baby mower I use on the lawn in Kendallville; it’s more like a tank – that you push. Mother was pretty confident that self-propelled mowers never built character.

But you have riders, you exclaim. Well, yes, Mother started mowing fields and I left for college. I was invited to Indiana University for a special program the summer before my freshman year and when I came home, I saw my parents had been mowing with a riding mower. This is probably basically what happened to a guy on one of Der Bingle’s flight crews. His dad had a garden every year until he graduated . . . and then it was off to the produce department.