Like Falling Off A Bicycle...

I cut my lawn today.
   BFD, you might say. Who doesn't cut a lawn? And I might have said the same thing with you nine years ago. I made spending cash for a very long time cutting lawns and doing yardwork and generally being an indentured servant to people with more time and money than I. At least once a week from the time I was 8 years old until I was 35 I did some sort of manual labor out in the hot Texas sun. Even when I lived in an apartment I still did work on my grandmother's house, or for my parents, or - less frequently - for friends and friends of friends.
   Then I moved to SoCal.
   People don't do their own yards in California, they get someone else to do the heavy lifting. That someone else used to be me, but I lived in an apartment in the Playhouse District in Pasadena, a place with more concrete than yard, and there just wasn't any reason for me to do any real work. In the past nine years I've grown accustomed to not sweating in that way, to not moving in that way, to not thinking in that way. I got out of the yardwork habit.
   But now that I'm back in Texas and now that I have a yard of my own I've been shoved into the deep end of the manual labor pool. I borrowed my brother-in-law's mower and edger this morning and got to work.
   I gotta say, I did pretty good for being nine years out of practice. I never realized when I was still doing it just how particular I had become about the way I do things. Very picky. And I'm right back there now, finding the rhythm, feeling the beat, getting back into the groove. I'll get this yard into the shape I want it, and then I'll keep it that way. Because that's how I roll. Behind a lawnmower once again.