Greener Pastures

Greener Pastures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 17, 2015

I’ve never understood the relationship between man and lawn. On any summer’s morning, I can wake to find my live-in greenkeeper out the back, in the smallest of silky pyjama shorts, inspecting his Sir Walter buffalo. Hands on hips, he meanders back and forth tracing grid patterns in his turf, engrossed in the grass at his feet. The swell of his New Year’s tummy throws a soft round shadow on his beloved lawn.

I lean against the kitchen bench and admire his XL silhouette through the glass doors. Something catches his eye. He drops to one knee and prospects in the grass with a stick. I predict a lone dandelion weed, or some marauding clover or – quelle horreur! – a lumbering black beetle.

Watching him worship his lawn, I feel a surge of jealousy. Why is he yet to descend on bended knee before me, the saintly mother of his children? I brush aside my Virgin Queen fantasies as he rises and greets me with a winsome smile. He points triumphantly to the leafy weed he has snuffed from the grass. Such devotion to his turf!

Our lawn spreads from the back veranda like a viridescent carpet. It’s eye-calmingly green but has become inexplicably brindled with two brown patches along the south fence. By day’s end, I’ll find my man crouched beside one circle of yellowed thatch, hose in hand, lovingly coaxing four small green shoots to proliferate.

In summer, the soundtrack to my weekend becomes the absonant roar of his mower. My bloke emerges from the house in a Panama hat and shorts, printed with a vivid pattern of interlocking elephants. The garden shed is emptied of trimmer, edger, whipper snipper, blower and broom. He lines them up along the driveway and stands back to admire his arsenal of gardening tools. (In our house, a chore can be elevated to a hobby if it requires a trip to Bunnings and the purchase of a power tool.)

He flexes his biceps and leans down to grasp the pull cord. With a single powerful jerk, his periwinkle-blue Victa Vantage coughs, then screams to life.

“And that’s how it’s done!” he calls over his shoulder to seven-year-old son. Small boy bolts inside, hands clapped to his ears. As his father marches the mower across the lawn, small daughter pinches her nose, choked by the smell of petrol. I remind myself to appreciate the sight of man and machine in perfect congruence.

The lawns of my childhood were swathes of spongy buffalo needing constant nurturing. In the early mornings, our street thrummed with the tic-tic-tic of sprinklers, calling to each other like birds. I practiced my handstands and cartwheels on the front lawn only to be rewarded with a patchwork of grass cuts that stung like blazes.

In the summer holidays, it was my job to shepherd our Beagle on his morning constitutional. We’d sniff our way around the golf course. Even at 6.30am, I could smell the heat riding in on the easterly. Then the greenkeeper would climb aboard his ride-on mower and saturate the air with the humid sweetness of cut grass. I warily skirted the par four fairway, where the giant sprinklers spun around on their tripod legs, trying to blast me with machine-gun jets of water.

On drowsy February afternoons, our back lawn would be baked crisp. My job was to water the garden with the hose. Cranky and hot, I haphazardly squirted the grass, yanking on the hose and cursing the kinks. More often than not, I heard the sound of the kitchen window being wrenched open and Mum’s voice shouting: “And if you break that hose, young lady, you’ll be watering ‘til April!”

Thirty years later, I live with a man who has joined that great confraternity of lawn devotees. How green is it? How lush is it? How neat and clipped and weed-free is it? These are the questions that try men’s souls.

I asked the local lawn-mower man, Selwyn, about his philosophy of lawns.

“Mowing grass is therapeutic,” he explained. “It’s about power and control: crisp lines, clean edges. A perfect result in a crappy world.”

That made sense. At 78, my mum still cuts her own lawn with a hand mower.

“I do my best thinking when I’m mowing,” Mum says. “In any case, a lawn should reflect nicely on a house.”

Arriving home yesterday, I discovered my lawn-lover face down on the verge. He’d hacked up a square foot of grass and was elbow deep in dirt, swearing over a retic pipe I’d driven over. I sat beside him and gently suggested his lawn fetish was becoming obsessive.

“Honey,” I asked. “What’s that relationship in nature when one organism lives off another?

“You mean marriage?”

“No,” I bristled. “I meant symbiosis. But feel free to sleep out with your lawn tonight.”

Wooden it be nice?

Wooden it be nice
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 22, 2014

I was mother to two sons before I became mother to a daughter. A mother of sons knows that Stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut. She knows buttons in lifts are for pressing, all at once, so passengers can appreciate the identical landings on every floor. And she knows it’s impossible to pass by a construction site without stopping to gawp.

But when I visited a school fete last weekend, it was my four-year-old daughter who spotted the carpentry tent first. “Hammers!” she shouted to her brother, and the pair of them darted off into the crowd.

I dutifully followed, lugging a bag of second-hand books, a tomato seedling and two half-eaten clouds of fairy floss wrapped around grimy sticks. “The Joy of Wood,” said the sandwich board propped at the tent-front. “$2 per child. No experience required.”

That’s lucky, I thought, as my daughter grabbed a hammer from one of the workbenches and swung it over her head. The dad behind her dodged sideways. “Not so high!” I cried. I whispered “Sorry!” to the dad. He flashed me a grin.

I glanced around to locate 7-year-old son. He’d discovered the sawing station and was trying to hack through a chunk of pine with a hand saw, his legs splayed, frowning with concentration.

A man wearing a well-hung tool belt and a name-tag ‘Greg’ upended a hessian sack of wood scraps into a plastic clam shell on the grass. Kids dropped to their knees and rummaged through the heap. Two small boys grappled over a triangular piece peppered with drill holes. The loser zig-zagged away sobbing to find his mum.

My youngster was still engrossed at the sawing station. Greg showed him how to fix an offcut into a vice. “Measure twice. Cut once,” I heard Greg say. “Hold the saw gently. Elbows in. That’s it!” Boy and tool became acquainted and began to work seamlessly.

“Let’s make a treasure box, hey?” I suggested to my daughter, noticing all the dads were making bigger boxes. I sifted through plywood and pine, searching for rectangles of similar size. But every piece was a different thickness. Unwisely, I gave my 4-year-old the power of veto over slabs she didn’t like. She used it indiscriminately, rejecting the only matching pair I dug out. “I don’t like the colour,” she said, inspecting one offcut. “And it’s got a rough bit. See?”

“That’s a knot,” I informed her. “That’s where a branch grew out of the tree.” She shrugged and threw the piece back on top of the pile. The victor from the tug-of-war dived across me to grab it.

Under the tarpaulin, the pounding of twenty hammers was hurting my ears. We claimed a workbench in the sun and got to work on our box project.

At first I felt clumsy. I’d forgotten how hard it is to bang a nail in straight. I struggled to keep my timber steady. My right angles ranged from 85 to 95 degrees. I spent more time ripping out duds with the pincer than using the hammer. Daughter sighed as she collected my bent nails from the grass. “They look like worms!” she said.

But as my confidence grew, the hammer began to feel at home in my hand. Lining up hammer head to nail head, I swapped blind faith for belief, then certainty. I no longer worried about smashing my thumb. The nails drove straight in. I banged them flush with half a dozen easy knocks.

My daughter was a navvy in a previous life. She didn’t flinch when I pinched her thumb to free a splinter. She got her hands dirty. She carefully selected my next nail from the container and held the pincer at the ready. In under an hour, we produced a box. It had a makeshift lid anchored to one corner by a long nail, allowing it to swivel open.

I put her in charge of quality testing while I cleaned up our mess. She yanked the lid sideways, left and right, but it didn’t give way. She scrounged under a nearby Eucalyptus and filled her treasure box with two gumnuts and a gold bottle top, then swung the lid closed. I don’t know who was prouder of our handiwork. Me, I decided.

Greg wandered over and pointed out my son, who was still sawing away, a growing pile of wood scraps at his feet. “There’s always one!” Greg said, chuckling. “All they want to do is saw. No building, no hammering. Just sawing. Boy discovers the mystical pleasures of manual labour!”

I nodded. “That was the best fun I’ve had in ages. Why does woodwork feel so satisfying?”

“It just does,” said Greg. “It’s good for the soul.”