Tall Girl

I would like to preface this post by saying that it was inspired by one Emily and her triumph of mowing (trust me I'll tie my post into hers in one way or another)

I am neither amazonian (thanks Ben) nor am I midgie, I'm just on the verge of being tall. At a towering 5 foot 9 inches (which I've been since about 7th grade) though I seem to have been taller than all my roomates. One in paticular referred to me as "Tall Girl". This term of endearment often was followed by some request to reach something just out of her arm span. She was a little on the short side, ok maybe 5 foot 2, so I was a giant compared to her. In fact, I lamented to her once upon seeing our shoes lined up at the front door that a normal sized person lived here and then the largest possible human being in the world.

Somehow being tall also means that lawn mowing falls to you. It seems the height of the person abd the the height of the grass are all related. So after realizing that we had let the yard go - i.e. you could hide n old VW bug in the weeds and no one would be the wiser. The problem was that we didn't have a lawn mower, so being ever so resourceful I purchased one from Wallyworld. In my great wisdom I figured that all lawnmowers were the same and really just whack at the grass so I didn't need to spend all my money on something fancy or assembled.

I came home with my large box of lawnmower parts and set off (with the help of a friend who was actually going to mow the lawn for me for a wad of cash) to make myself a weed destruction machine. After some creative assembly, consisting of a lot of "this looks right" type comments, we had a fully functioning lawn mower. Well fully funtioning might not be the right word. In fact my friend's friend, who was there to witness this mowing endeavor (why does everything in my life turn into an "event") called it the "Fisher Price Mower".

So my friend sets to work attacking the jungle we called a backyard and well lets just say that if you've let the yard go then you really need more than a fisher price mower to get the job done. I've never seen someone mow with the mower at a 60 degree angle the majority of the time. The job got done, the mower survived, and I paid my poor friend much more than most lawn jockey's make for the odyssey I put him through.

Suffice it to say, I quickly became a mowing expert and could wield my little red lawnmower with amazing skills. Oh, another thing about roomies and mowing, if you own the mower you are the designated mower. Any thought of sharing responsiblity fly out the window at that point, height and ownership dub you the "official whacker of all things growing".