Don’t mind me.
You know. Distracted. Reading. Painting shelves. Pushing a reel mower through a month’s worth of shin-high grass. That sort of thing.
I thought I’d gone mad for a while there and was imagining we’re now a country that sanctions torture and secret imprisonment without trial and monarchial, even theocratic power vested in a deeply unpopular ruler and preemptive war and the use of nuclear weapons, but then I got better.
I haven’t seen a reel mower in action for a long time. Shin-high grass and a reel mower will put muscles on you.
I used to have a very nice scythe, which I’d take out for yardly duties and the edification of the neighbors. One of them approved greatly. He’s since passed away, but I cherish some nice memories of the fellow.
He was a WW II veteran, a runaway when he joined. He was a big fellow and managed to pass without being doubted about his age. Came home and went to college on the GI Bill. My dogs were very fond of his, which he took as a sign of good character, theirs and mine :-) Politcally, he was what one might call a New Deal conservative—strong on the value of labor and the need for big “L” labor to be valued.
He disliked hurting people, never talked about his war service and scolded me halfheartedly when I told him I wrote in his dog for office because I couldn’t find any decent candidates.
Perhaps he lived in the country you were thinking of.
I bought a new one years ago and the cheap handle snapped after about a season and a half of pushing through what my yard ends up looking like when it’s been raining for a while. So I went and bought a used one, much sturdier, with this great mechanism that lets you set the height, so I can do one pass at 2 1/2 inches and it cuts the shin-high stuff like butter, tough butter, but still, and then do another pass at 1 1/4 or so to get it respectable if a little punk rock, and it’s a great mower, only the roller snapped off the first time I used it. Luckily, the warranty was good, and it’s been with me ever since. (I swore a solemn teenaged oath, cranking a gas-powered mower one more time under a brutal South Carolina sun, to never again; now, I use a reel mower. Thus do we loophole ourselves. Compromise!)
Couldn’t say it better myself.