Phil (my husband) has been working really long hours lately. We both have. But right now he’s working seven days a week, 13 days on with one fatigue day off. He leaves before most people are awake and gets home late, and by the time he does, there isn’t much daylight left.
The grass needed mowed.
We’ve had rain almost every day, so it was thick enough that our push mower wasn’t going to handle it very well. Which meant I needed to use the rider.
I had never used our riding lawn mower before, but I’d watched Phil use it plenty of times. It had two pedals, like a car, so I figured, I can drive this. I figured out how to start it, got it out of the garage with no damage done, and drove it around to the backyard.
Yay me!
It took me another minute to figure out how to put the blade down, but I got it. Off I went.
I made a couple of rounds and was doing pretty good. I saw the little rabbit and turtle on the speed control and decided to crank it up a little more toward the rabbit. My confidence was growing. Now I was cruising!
I started thinking about Phil coming home after another long day. He was going to be so surprised that, A, I had figured out how to use the riding lawn mower all by myself, and B, I had mowed the grass for him.
One less thing he had to do. This was going beautifully.
Until…
I was coming up on my flower bed, going a little faster than I probably should have been, and took the turn too late. Suddenly I realized I was heading straight into my flowers. I tried to steer out, but 40-some years of driving muscle memory kicked in.
BRAKE!
I stepped on the pedal.
Not a brake!
Instead of stopping, I sped up and went farther into the flower bed. Flowers were going down, and the mower was making ungodly noises. Lots of them.
I panicked and moved my foot to the other pedal.
Also not a brake!
Now I was going in reverse, making even more terrible noises, and I was stuck. This whole thing probably happened in less than a minute. I was hitting pedals, trying to steer, listening to horrible noises, and watching my flower bed disappear underneath a riding lawn mower.
I turned it off. I just f-ed up the lawn mower.
Then I looked at my flower bed. I had taken out three of my perennial plants along with others. To be fair, they had gotten really big and I’d thought about removing them at the end of the season anyway.
This just wasn’t the removal method I’d had in mind.
I hopped off the mower and decided maybe I could just pull it out of the flower bed by myself.
Because yes, I’m Hercules. 
I grabbed hold and pulled. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. That mower did not move one inch.
My nephew had been in town, so I called him, hoping maybe he could come over and help me get the mower out before Phil got home. Unfortunately, he’d already left town. He couldn’t help me, but he did get a good laugh out of my predicament.
So now I had a riding lawn mower stuck in my flower bed, three fewer perennials, a mower I was fairly certain I had broken, and no accomplice available to help me hide the evidence.
When Phil got home, the first thing he wanted to know was, “How did this happen?”
Fair question.
I explained my little trip into the flower bed and said, “Well, I figured out there’s no brake.”
“Yeah, there’s no brake.”
That would’ve been really great information to have before I started mowing, but I digress.
Then Phil looked around. Now, in my defense, I had noticed while I was mowing that there seemed to be an awful lot of grass clippings. It kind of looked like we were baling hay. I thought that was a little strange, but not strange enough to make me stop mowing.
“Did the lawn mower do this?” he asked, pointing at the backyard.
“Yeah.”
Phil got on the mower and took a closer look.
“Oh. You had the blade all the way down.”
And there was the second piece of information that would’ve been really useful about 30 minutes earlier. I had figured out how to engage the blade. I didn’t know you could adjust the height.
By then I had mowed almost the entire backyard. The only part I hadn’t gotten to was about three passes in the middle, leaving a little rectangle of normal grass surrounded by a completely scalped yard.
So there I stood next to a riding lawn mower stuck in my flower bed, looking at the crop circle I had created in our backyard, getting the lawn mower lesson I really could have used before I started.
Phil got down on the ground and looked underneath the mower. Much to my relief, everything was intact.
I don’t know if we have guardian angels assigned specifically to lawn mower incidents, but I appreciated the fact that I had not wrecked the mower.
My flowers, on the other hand, were wrecked.
In my defense, Phil had never actually shown me how to use the rider. Knowing there was no brake and that the blade had more than one setting would have been helpful.
Although there is one piece of evidence that doesn’t exactly help my case.
This was not technically my first experience with a riding lawn mower.
When I was a teenager, Dad told me to mow the grass. I’m pretty sure he intended for me to use the push mower, but there was a perfectly good riding mower sitting in the garage, and teenage me saw no reason to make the job harder than necessary.
I checked the gas tank. It needed gas, so I poured some in. I slopped a little around, but didn’t think much of it. I put the cap back on and started the mower.
Fire.
Oh my God. 
There’s fire!
I went running out of the garage like one of those crazy people you see in a cartoon, looking around frantically as if a bucket of water might magically appear.
Luckily, my Uncle Tom was sitting on his patio across the street. He saw my panicked self come flying out of the garage, saw the smoke and fire, and sprang into action. He ran over, grabbed the hose, and put it out.
Once the horror of the possibility I was going to burn the garage down was over, I realized there was an awful lot of smoke in there.
The mower was fine. The garage was fine. Nobody had died.
But Dad was going to come home. And my ass was going to be grounded.
So Uncle Tom and I went into cover-up mode. We got a fan blowing to clear the smoke, wiped down the mower, and did our best to remove the evidence.
As far as I know, Dad never knew there had actually been a fire. At least, he never said he knew.
I’m sure he wondered, though. The grass had been mowed with the push mower, but the garage floor was wet. So was the rider.
I wasn’t volunteering any additional information.
So when I climbed onto Phil’s riding lawn mower all these years later thinking, I’ve got this, there was some historical evidence suggesting otherwise.
Since I hadn’t busted the mower, Phil said he would finish the front yard. Then I looked around at what I had done.
There were mounds of grass everywhere. Phil said he was going to have to rake it because that much cut grass would kill whatever was still alive after I had scalped the yard.
So while he headed to the front, I grabbed a rake and started gathering mounds of hay in the backyard.
I figured helping clean up the mess I had created would probably be good for my marriage.
As I raked, I kept shaking my head and laughing at myself. I had started this whole thing because I wanted to make Phil’s life easier. Instead, he was still mowing the front yard while I was trying to rescue whatever grass was left in the backyard.
As the daylight disappeared, I thought the whole situation couldn’t get much more ridiculous.
That’s when I raked up a small water snake.
Of course I did. 
I jumped and screamed, and the snake did snakey things. Because crashing a riding lawn mower into my flower bed, scalping the lawn, and creating a hay field in the backyard wasn’t enough excitement for one evening.
Eventually, we got everything cleaned up. The mower survived. Most of my flower bed survived. And, most importantly, my marriage survived. 
The snake did not. 
I feel like Phil may have taken out a little of his frustration on that snake, and frankly, I appreciate its sacrifice.
I owed Phil an apology, and he got one. Luckily, he knew I really had been trying to help. Either I married a very patient man, or after 35 years he knows me well enough to recognize when a disaster started with good intentions.
As for me, I have now operated a riding lawn mower twice in my life. The first one caught fire. The second one ended up in a flower bed.
I think the responsible thing at this point is to recognize the pattern.
Anyway—Off We Go.
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