When it comes to fixing, building, creating, or taking stuff apart and putting it back together...I have no skills. Even more than that, I have no interest or desire to perform or even assist with any of those tasks. Good thing I married a woman with enough curiosity and intelligence to tinker with things in order to determine whether they can be fixed simply or not. She has skills!
Yesterday our push mower bit the dust. I was weedeating out front and my wife was going to start the mowing to be relieved by me later. She came from the backyard to inform me the machine wouldn't start. I just needed to add my male muscle and we would be good...or so I imagined. It had happened that way before. Nothing doing this time. The old self-propelled, mulching mower was door-nail dead.
I returned to finish the weedeating. My wife visited our neighbor to see if we could borrow her push mower. We had already been looking for a replacement mower since our second one had died some months earlier. It was our habit for me to start with the larger, heavier machine our front while my wife began in the back with the lighter grass cutter. We would meet somewhere out back in half the time it took for one of us to cut the yard. We'd been taking turns in the heat this summer ever since the demise of the smaller mower.
After a few minutes my wife accompanied the neighbor on her riding mower to our side yard. She gave me a quick lesson showing me how to use her rider...something I'd avoided doing my entire life...until today. It was a fairly simple new trick for this old dog to learn. It was quick and the yard was mowed in no time. It helped that my wife took the neighbor's push mower to our back part by the creek and mowed that area, so I didn't have quite so much maneuvering to do on the borrowed monstrosity. Once that task was completed, we now had at least a week to shop for a new mower.
Morning dawned. Flashback to the first paragraph of this blog...remember my wife? She has skills! That and her curiosity for tinkering found us in our garage at 8:00 a.m. We brought both mowers from the storage shed, put down a plastic sheet, got a kneeling pad, and a couple of tools from the kit in the corner of the garage, and she began. She started her tinkering. Some things she tried didn't work; some things seemed to help. Bottom line...The major culprit on each mower may have been its air filter. By the time I returned these mowers to their side-by-side places in the shed, they both were working. The air filters had been cleaned and successfully reassembled. Wow! What a wife! Told you she has skills.
This brought to mind my early years in education. I began my 40-year career in the 70s with nearly a decade as a high school English teacher. One of my yearly activities with my senior students was a classroom auction. I would participate as moderator and bidder as well. Each of us had $5,000 to spend on a long list of items ranging from vacations to careers and personal attributes...anything of sentimental or financial value to an individual. I remember bidding on, and often b
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| All kinds of amazing skills! Photo in Virginia, 2008 |
I was sort of fascinated as I sat in my garage this morning on a lawn chair and watched my wife battle those two mowers. She eventually won the war! Did I mention SHE HAS SKILLS?
We will test those skills in a week or so by mowing the yard once again. She will start in the back and I up front. Hopefully our mower shopping will be postponed until at least the off season. We shall see. Time will tell. It's incredible that after 49+ years of marriage...my wife still amazes me!
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