Okay. I get it now.

Our grass had reached about to my armpits...but I'm short, so it was still workable. Then my neighbor John burned up the bearings on his mower, and I finally caved in. I borrowed Katie's boyfriend's spiffy John Deere mower with the automatic transmission and the cupholders.

It was a little incongruous...pulling that beautiful new mower on John's crappy trailer with the rotten boards, pulled by my crappy eBay pickup, but I can handle a little inconsistancy in my life. I'm just that flexible. Ask anyone. Flexibility is my middle name.

But now...I'm in love with that powerful, shiny mower. It's like the Fabio of Mowers. If mowers could open the top three buttons on their grill, this one would do it. You can imagine it's hair, if it had hair, blowing gently back from it's manly, chiselled features. This mower would NOT get hit in the face with a goose. It'would deflect the goose with it's cupholder. It's just that clever.

I'm going to offer to trade Katie to him for the mower. Think of it as a dowry. She's young and strong and will make him a good wife. And I'll be able to mow the entire three acres in three hours. See? It's a win-win!

Afterwards, while I was still deaf from the mower anyway, I borrowed John's chainsaw and cut down an old tree that was dead and filled with carpenter ants. And that was fun...chainsaws are so butch...but I'm a little stove up today. In fact, I think maybe my hair is the only think that doesn't hurt this morning.

So...while I was tooling around on the ultra-fast John Deere, I was thinking maybe I could get a new one, and consider the other one a restoration project...a show piece, like antiques.

Damn that Dane. He's ruined my love affair with my old mower. He's turned me into a mower whore.