I  remember hearing my father describe how, years before I was born, he and my mom bought the house I grew up in, a little farmhouse on an acre of land. It was 1945, the Second World War had just ended, and soldiers were coming home and starting families, so my dad figured he’d better a house before they were all bought up. Out in the suburbs of the big Midwestern city where they were living he found this old farm house — the farm had just been subdivided into lots for new houses. He got the house with an acre of land for $3600 — but the barn wound up on the lot next door.

Rule #1 — you can’t cut the grass with a lawnmower if you let it get waist high.

The elderly lady who had lived in the house died in 1942, so the place had three years to ‘go to weed’ and no effort had been made to cut the field grass that made up the yard. My dad was raised on a farm, though he had never owned one himself, so his solution was to take a scythe and cut the place by hand. Now that would have been no difficulty for my grand-dad or any of dad’s brothers who owned farms — they did that with several acres of wheat or oats each autumn. But as I said dad was no farmer.

Two Handed Scythes

He probably found the scythes in the vacant barn — even though, as I mentioned, that was technically off his property. That lot was as yet unsold, and the barn _looked_ like it belonged with the house. He certainly had no need of scythes in their former urban home. I use the plural because I know there were two, because I remember we still had them as I was growing up. If he’d gone out and bought a scythe, I can’t see why he would get two. If he found them in the barn however …

Some of you younger folks might be wondering what a scythe is. Those are the big curved-handles ending in long curved blade — kind of like an overgrown sickle (the Russian hammer and sickle type, not the straight blade with serrated edges that you swing like a golf club). I’m sure you have seen plenty of scythes, the black hooded skeleton known as Death carries one all the time.

So to hear dad tell the story, cutting that acre of land with nothing but a two-handed scythe was a Sisyphean task — by the time he nearly completed the entire yard, it was time to start over because the first-cut area had grown so fast.

Rule #2 — while mowing lawn, you can’t do anything else at the same time.

The first time dad tried to mow the lawn with just a scythe, he brought along his three young children — my elder siblings — aged two, three and five. They were to remain in the car while he worked on the lawn and mother started cleaning up the long-neglected house, so they could move in.

It was fine summer’s day, but the meter-high weeds were too thick and potentially dangerous with snakes and bees and such, to allow the toddlers to roam. But at five, the largest child was just too rambunctious to keep cooped up without some kind of mischief.

The glove compartment of the old Ford provided the perfect diversion — dad’s pipe tobacco. Just a sniff and nibble convinced the imp that this was not great stuff, but the others wanted to try it too. The three year old was not impressed either — but the little two year old seemed to like it. Curious, but then to each his own. The older child indulged the infant’s strange taste.

Naturally, it did not take long before the baby was throwing up all over the inside of the car, and all over the two other urchins. Mother completed her house cleaning, only to find a bigger cleaning task awaited her. Of course each parent blamed the other for not paying more attention to the kids, while the real culprit emerged unscathed. Father soon purchased his first gas powered lawn mower.

These days, of course, we cut the lawn with a more modern version of that old lawn mower. But the roar of that device, plus the attention needed to avoid hitting obstacles, flowers and living creatures of various sorts, means that the advice is as good for power mower cutting as swinging a hand scythe — never try to do anything else while mowing.