Very often when I ride on Saturdays it seems like a disproportionate part of the country population chooses to mow right around the time I cycle. On the one hand, I totally get that the people need to mow their grass on probably work pretty normal jobs, so that they have only weekends. I often wonder why they would be out mowing in the late morning/noonish time frame, with the sun high in the sky. Then again, I'm sure they look at me and others still on their bikes around that time and ask the same question (at least bikers have the self-generated breeze to offset the heat).
Of course, when working from home, I have often fulminated in my mind (and therefore also here on the blog) about the ever-present drone of lawn equipment that attacks our ears during the work day. It all seems so terribly unfair!
I had never considered that their might be a cultural norm deprecating mowing on Sundays, which seems to be the case in smaller, Christian communities. I 100% get it on Sunday mornings and near churches, by the way, you can just feel that. But Sunday afternoons/evenings always seemed like fair game, and they pretty much are here in Chapel Hill. When I read an allusion to this in a Journal article this morning about the impact of a biggish employer (Pella) in a small Iowa town (also named Pella), I was momentarily surprised, but not terribly so.
The real culprit is, of course, the grass fetish and what it is a symptom of: the urge not just to conquer nature (and therefore randomness) but to make the conquest ever and continually manifest.
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