Love me? Mow my lawn.

One of these days, I keep telling myself, I'll find the perfect answer to all my lawn-care problems, but unfortunately, today is not that day.

I once thought a weed-eater was the answer, but that big old gas-powered weed-eater is so heavy that it wears me out--and besides, I've never been able to start it, so I couldn't do any weed-eating at all in the absence of the resident weed-eater-starter.

So I bought myself a lightweight electric weedeater that plugs in to a pair of 50-foot extension cords so that I can trim all around the front, sides, and back of the house plus up around the herb gardens and part-way down the driveway. Great! Except that it runs through weed-eater line at the speed of light (three spools each week!) and the spools are hard to load and unload so that someone who shall remain nameless squeezed it a little too hard and cracked the head so that it's now hard to get it to load properly, and if you don't load it just right, then the minutes you turn it on, all the line comes flabbering out in one big green plastic mess that you then have to stop and untangle and rewind or else waste  that entire spool, thereby driving up the cost of weed-eating even more.

And then there is the poison ivy problem. The resident poison-ivy-eradicator does valiant battle against the noxious weed wherever it rears its ugly face, but sometimes I don't realize that poison ivy is hiding in the tall weeds until I'm in the middle of mowing them down, and then poison ivy bits go blasting all over everything, including me. If I haven't had a poison-ivy breakout this summer, it's only because I'm pretty diligent about getting straight to the shower the minute I've finished the day's trimming.

And here is my final problem: Even the lightweight weed-eater wears me out when I'm trimming on those steep slopes that surround our house, so I tend to spend an hour or so trimming and then save the rest for tomorrow, except maybe it rains tomorrow or we're out of town or it's 102 degrees and humid and I'd rather not. The end result is that our yard constantly looks as if it's being maintained by someone with an extremely short attention span: when the front yard looks good, the back looks like an experiment in tallgrass prairie restoration; when the back looks nice, the strip along the driveway looks like the path to the witch's house. 

Of course, the advantage of living our here in the sticks is that no one really cares what our lawn looks like. Except me. I care deeply. Someday I'll even care enough to find the perfect tool to fix the problem. 

Today, though, is definitely not the day.