"It is so easy to mow the lawn with that mower!"

It turns out that I am a closet environmentalist. The overhaul on our house included new landscaping for the yard, which involved buying several truckloads of topsoil and a ton of grass seed. Now we have a beautiful lawn.

Steve immediately set about watering it copiously several times a day. He had plenty of time to devote to this during the summer, and the lawn was fruitful and multiplied.

I felt terrible about using all of this water. I made up for it by purchasing an old-fashioned mower, the sort that might have been used in the 1850s. It has two big blades that whip around when you push it. I decided that this would probably be an environmental trade-off: no need for gasoline, therefore there would be no fossil-fuel emissions, therefore it would not be as terrible for the environment.

All that watering, combined with the long hot summer days, meant that the lawn was growing faster than we could keep mowing it, especially with me working late every night. I'm not totally sure how, but somehow it became MY job to do all of the mowing. With the old-fashioned mower, it became necessary to mow every two or three days. The blades just wouldn't cut grass that was too long. And the mower wouldn't go through grass that was too thick.

One day I told Steve he would do the next mow. Then I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I was still waiting when the leaves started to fall off the trees. And when the frost formed on my car in the mornings.

Steve decided tonight that he would borrow the neigbour's gasoline mower, and he is now totally enamoured. I like to imagine that before he could use it, he had to load it into the back of the truck and drive it to the gas station. Then he had to fill it with gas, and he probably spilled gas all over the ground and had to make a report to the environment department. Then, of course, he had to put more gas in the truck, because Steve's truck is basically nothing more than a direct line to al-Qaeda's bank account. Then he had to drive back home, struggle to get the mower out of the back of the truck, and yank on the chain a bunch of times to get it started. There are probably scratches in the back of our truck. Also, he'll probably smell like gasoline all night.

My nice old-fashioned mower smells like freshly-cut grass.