People outside the cities in the first half of the twentieth century likely kept their connection to the soil by gardening and small-scale farming. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards, flowers, and shrubs had largely replaced gardening for food as a connection. As a youngster the condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry’s fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our American-dream yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.
Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass around the house did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. By the second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all I judged it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few very nice backyards in my adult life.
Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life. She came from the world of well-manicured yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda decided the long grass had to go. She and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. The yard became manicured soon afterwards. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.
For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.
One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have. I almost had a heat stroke once mowing our big yard there.
Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower which I’m told requires better reflexes than we older folks have. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mowing service, choosing the hard spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer. After all by then i was over 70 years old.
When our current, very capable mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home.
We are trying to go more natural in the backyard by not using any chemicals or herbicides. I would like to see more fireflies and butterflies like I remember from my youth. No one ever worried about a little clover showing up in your yard in those days.
We continue to garden a little like old southerners are supposed to do. However, I have backed off the serious gardening that I did in 2023 and the slightly less ambitious garden of 2024. My six Cherokee Purple tomato plants produced over four hundred and eighty tomatoes in the summer of 2024. We had to sell some at a produce stand after we filled our freezer. Last summer we cut back to three tomato plants. This summer maybe we will have one or two, but I have already been out digging in the garden getting it ready. There is no danger of me losing my connection to the soil for a while longer.
Our technological infirmity 
