Who mows your lawn nowadays? You probably don't. A whole new business has grown up around grass and the need to manicure the lawn. Everyone works nowadays. There are enough “honey do” chores for Saturdays without spending several hours doing lawn care.

I have been paying for lawn service for several years now. There came the time I no longer had the energy to do the job. My daughter Anne took over the chore then. With her need for hip surgery, she, too, became unable to continue. That was when I searched the newspaper ads for a lawn care company. Anne didn't want me to hire someone for a job she should be doing. That's what she said. No one in our family had ever paid someone to mow our lawn.

I remember back when I was a teenager. Dad mowed the lawn most of the time. My two brothers had chores of their own to do. That left me to help Dad. I didn't want to, but I knew better than to tell my father, “No.” I got out there and helped. With a hand sickle in hand, I swung it back and forth cutting off the plantain flower stalks that our old push lawn mower wasn't able to do. It seemed like that farmhouse lawn went on forever.

The favorite summertime job of my brothers when we moved to town was mowing neighbors' lawns. They would start out on a Saturday morning and cruise the neighborhood. “Hey, Mister. I'll mow your yard for fifty cents.” That isn't done anymore. The charge has gone up, way up. Fifty to one hundred dollars is not unheard of today. The mowers arrive in a pick-up pulling a trailer containing several lawn care machines. The job is done in less than an hour: mowed, trimmed and clippings blown off the driveway. Then on the way to their next job.

You know, there was a time before the power mowers of today. The thought of a riding mower was the height of laziness. The push lawn mowers of old were a constant chore to keep going. The blades had to be sharpened before you even considered tackling the project. They dulled quickly. Sometimes, when the grass was a bit high and the weather had been dry, sharpening was done more than once during the cutting. There came the time when the blades were so worn that it was time to buy a new lawnmower. The up side of the situation was that you didn't have to buy belts, gas or oil for the old-timey ones.

You know, it is easy to think some things have always been this way. Not so. There are still some of us oldsters around that remember the way it was before . . . (Insert your own word here). Mowing was easier with the advent of the gas-powered, belt-driven, and now riding lawn mower. It became a wearisome task, too, when both Mom and Dad had to work to put food on the table. It became easier to pay someone to mow the lawn. That's where we are today. `