Green Acres

It was too nice a day to stay indoors.  After watching my driver come in fifth (that's not a bad showing for points) at Bristol, Bessie Anne and I headed outside.  She selected a vantage point in the shade of an oak and I fired up the lawn tractor for the first time this year.  The grass-slash-weeds had not reached a critical height, but last year's dead weeds had the place looking pretty straggly and I decided to get a jump on it.  Putt-putting around the west field on a warm spring day is my idea of heaven, and I was humming the theme song to "Green Acres."  (It occurs to me that there is a whole generation out there who wouldn't know what that is.)  I steered the tractor around patches of Baby blue eyes.  I can't bear to cut down these cheery little wildflowers that pop up every year, even if it does make the mowing look hit-and-miss.  I also had to avoid some pretty big burrows in the field, courtesy of the busy, busy ground squirrels.  A word to the wise:  wait until after you ride around on a gut-busting tractor for an hour or so to have that beer.  By the time I was making the last few passes, I'd kicked the tractor into fifth gear to git 'er done! 

After a short break (yup), I started mowing the south yard.  Unfortunately, under the broken oak by the clothesline where Tree Guy had been working, the terrain has changed and I high-centered the tractor in the weeds.  The tractor may be little, but it's still pretty darned heavy and it was a struggle to lift it up and over that hump.  That done, I finished that yard and decided I'd accomplished enough for the day.  Bess and I sat on the porch, sniffing the perfume of new-mown grass.  I was thinking there was no better aroma, but then thought of a baby's neck, puppy breath, frying onions and garlic, fresh bread, roast pork, lily-of-the-valley, my dad's Old Spice aftershave, pine trees; ohmigawsh, this world is full of wonderful smells.

All that thinking made me hungry and I went in to make Bubble and Squeak for dinner.  I can't say that cooked cabbage is my favorite smell, but that dish sure made me, in words members of the Duck Dynasty cult will recognize, happy, happy, happy!

It was a good day.