And, no, I don’t mean me, but I’ll be danged if I didn’t hear people out mowing at 9 and 10 pm. Given we’ve finally reached the 100′s, I understand completely.
And yes, I know I mow a lot. But in these parts, everyone mows a lot because if you don’t, the snakes’ll get you, like they did Rurality, who found a timber rattlesnake in her driveway — which is upsetting for me because I have those living at my other place and had managed to convince myself they’re big Texas rat snakes.
But I’ll let you be the judge. Here’s a Google image search on timber rattlesnakes and here’s a Google image search on a timber rattler.
I prefer to think I have Texas rat snakes at the old place — especially because I’m going over there to mow.
In these parts, there’s a brief period of time between tornado season, monsoon season and ice storm season where there’s really nothing to say about the weather (we all already know it’s over 100 out here and really don’t want to talk about it anymore) when everyone’s talking about mowing. You know — the last time they mowed, when they have to mow again, maybe it’ll get so hot the grass will stop growing and they won’t have to mow, but they better mow because of the snakes and well, it’s hot now and we might have a fire so we better mow.
This is what happens when the grass grows a foot a week.
I wouldn’t mind high grass so much except that it’s not just the snakes, it’s the damned ticks. And being that we’re the Tick Capital of the World, what with being second only to North Carolina in the incidence of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and sharing the highest incidence of human monocytic ehrlichiosis with Arkansas and North Carolina — and let’s not forget about tick fever — well, what can you do but mow? It helps eliminate the tick hidey-holes, although then, they just go get in the trees and fall on you, unless you’re lucky enough to have a bunch of runaway chickens roosting in your trees.
Which, yes, I have had. Just not at the moment.
Ticks love high grass, maybe even more than snakes.
And so, we mow and wait for the weather to change so we can stop mowing to get the snakes and the ticks to go away and start talking about the weather again.
And so, come about 9 a.m., I’ll be off to mow, too, before it reaches 100 — if I can get the mower through the dew. You have to wear rainboots in the morning, it gets so wet. Which brings me to dew ponds, but that’s another diary entirely.
5 Comments
OMG! Where you live is a real challenge. Can you imagine anyone stopping in their covered wagon and saying,”Wow, this looks like a great place to live”?
I know, my family is from North Texas and I have no idea why they moved there.
I wish you well in your mowing quest. We actually have businesses here that rent goats to keep the grass and brush short. One of the malls near here uses goats in the storm water runoff areas around the mall. I never thought I see the day when driving along a state highway to see goats staked out eating brush along the easement.
I used to have goats and they did me no good whatsoever. Of course, maybe if I hadn’t taught them how to be even better acrobats, they would have been more effective mowers. ::sigh::
Maybe I’ll do another gratuitous critter pics and post their pic. They were awfully sweet. PITA, but sweet.
It happens here in suburbia, too, the mowing long after sundown. (How can they see what they are doing? Do lawnmowers come with headlights?)
I’m kind of in suburbia now — it’s a fair sized town which is very old and not economically, etc., dependent on the larger cities. We do have a suburban aspect here, of course, because we do have a huge city a mere 40 miles away.
But this is more towny than suburbany. If that makes sense.
Well, I seriously overslept, so didn’t get over to the other place to mow. I don’t even want to know what it’s like over there now.
I think I’m going to have to hire someone to just brush hog the whole place.
You must be logged in to post a comment.