Relative Something

Had a close call with the zero-turn mower when one of the rear wheels started sliding over the edge of a sharp drop near a culvert, and I couldn’t get it to climb back out. Every time I tried to maneuver it back onto flat ground, it felt like I was getting closer to disaster. This happened in a corner of our property near the road that was about as far away as I could get from the shop where I could get the help of the ATV and winch cable to pull the mower back up over that lip.

One thing I try to practice religiously is to stop before I make a problem worse than it already is. I immediately shut off the mower blades and lifted the deck to its highest setting. Getting out of the seat to look at the drop the wheel was caught on, I didn’t think it looked insurmountable. My next move involved muscling the front wheels into alignment to give the mower a straight shot out of the predicament.

One of the front wheels was up in the air, and it felt rather precarious to try sitting back on the seat with the mower tilted on the brink of no return. As soon as my butt landed, I goosed the drive wheels and rolled up onto solid ground again.

It was a real “Phew!” moment.

I was getting to the end of a long day of not just mowing, but multiple other good accomplishments as well. When I took Asher to retrieve the empty feed buckets after breakfast, he wanted to extend it into an adventure walk in our woods. I took advantage of that time to pull many vines off of tree trunks. The ground in the woods beyond the labyrinth is covered with a web of vines that take advantage of almost every tree they encounter.

There are so many vines; it seems like a fruitless attempt to defeat them all, except I noticed it wasn’t as bad as a year ago, so I think we are making progress. Knowing I would have some time between mowing sessions while batteries charged, I pulled the ATV trailer from the hay shed and filled it with composted manure to be spread on the hay field.

The rain of the previous two days kept me from mowing the yards around the house, so I started there first. The grass had definitely responded to the available ground moisture with added inches. While batteries charged after that effort, I started up the Grizzly and hauled two trailer loads of composted manure.

Then it was back to mowing and my close encounter with the drop-off near the culvert. I finished mowing just in time to help Cyndie with afternoon horse chores and found the horses in their calmest and most satisfied state. I gotta say, that’s one of the best ways to end a day filled with non-stop (sometimes anxiety-producing) activities on our land.

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