Confession

I am not proud of what I’m about to say. I am not pleased, or happy. No, rather, I feel a sort of quiet, secret shame.

Tonight was only the second time I’ve ever used a lawnmower.

I am 30 years old, and have only cut grass twice in my life. Once. Twice. That’s all.

In my childhood, my parents nurtured my nascent laziness on the whole lawn care front. God bless’em both. When the husband and I moved from an apartment to a rental house, my undisguised abhorrence for lawn cutting left no doubt that I would not be doing it. After we bought our first house, the husband’s inner Old Italian Guy began to surface, the one fortunate result of which being his anal obsession with grass care (I was less pleased his compulsive criticism of my housekeeping and his irresistible urge to hide money from me).

In fact, one of the final nails in the coffin that was my marriage involved an uncut lawn. The husband went away on a business trip and left behind a huge, tall, Florida Forest of uncut yard. I had offered to hire someone, but he insisted he wanted to do so—then he left. Embarrassed by the frolicking antelope in the front yard, I finally broke down and cut the grass on my own, and then went inside to cook a heavy meal, get drunk, and bitch to my best friend on the phone.

That was a Monday; I decided to get divorced on Wednesday.

Last summer, my ex-boyfriend was generous enough to hire someone to cut my grass for me all summer long. For awhile I felt sort of guilty about that, but now? Now I just see he was paying for my parting gift up front.

Which leads to tonight, and me and the Barbie Lawnmower I borrowed from my mother. I hope the neighbors weren’t watching, because I looked more than a little retarded. It is painfully obvious that I have no fucking business operating any sort of machinery that involves rapidly whirling blades.

Did you know that when you run over maple tree gumballs with a lawnmower it kind of sounds like popcorn popping, or perhaps exploding hamsters? I didn’t know that, either, but it totally does.

I need condo. I’ll explain later how my exterior wall came to be um, for lack of a better word, bleeding.