The whip...

The whip...

A couple years ago when we moved my mom out of the family homestead, we all had the opportunity to take any of the household goods that hadn't been divyed up in the Great Lottery.

For some reason I took one of the grass whips that my dad had. These seemed like antique tools from my childhood; I remember having to walk out in the boulevard in the summer heat and mow down the heads of the buckhorns that grew so high.

In the dry, hot weeks in July and August when the grass stops growing much the buckhorns would send their seed heads up and the lawn mower was just too much work so we'd take out the grass whips and mow them down. I remember pretending I was a golfer... and getting blisters from them.

So for whatever reason I hung on to one of these whips when we were packing up Mom's place, and it's been sitting in my garage since I moved last summer.

In the rain that we've had for the last few days, my grass has been getting pretty tall, and certain varieties have been shooting up tall sprigs. Not quite like buckhorn, but close. My new hand powered reel mower is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't do tall sprigs very well. So as I was mowing tonight I was wondering how I was going to deal with them when I remembered the old grass whip, and I retrieved it from oblivion in the Garagemahal. Even though it is dull and rusty after 40 years, I didn't need to replace batteries or change a spark plug.

It just works.