By Denny Bonavita

Ah, spring. Revive the old saw: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz; I wonder where the posies is.”

“The flowers are right beneath the mower blade!” she shouts.

Yes, my wife and I continue to amuse our dogs, cats and chickens with traditional sounds as we revert to our springtime outdoor work patterns.

May brings mowers. Mowers beget the Brutal Battle of the Begonias, the Titanic Tussle of the Tulips, the Dreaded Damage to the Daffodils.

She plants. I mow. Oh, she does mow, too. We split the weekly nine hours or so about 70/30. I honcho riding mowers for a few more hours each week than she does. She more than compensates by spending hours on end in and around her gardens, shrubs, flower beds and the like. That spares me and my arthritis-wracked lower back a lot of work with shovels, tillers, hoes, etc.

The problem comes about because my wife is a “spaces” person. She intuitively scatters seed here, plants bushes there, seamlessly blending blue sky, white clouds, charcoal gray barn, into a visual delight of color that lasts from the first of May until the hard frosts of October.

Me? I’m a “borders” person. I like straight lines. I mow cleanly along the edge of the back sidewalk, guiding the walk-behind mower’s deck to skim an inch or two beyond each side of the pavement.

Oops. There sits a tulip. Or the tulip “sat” there before I chugged that way. When I mow, I have my own vision. I focus on a point. Perhaps it is a tree, a bush, a driveway … but it does not occupy a space. It marks a border.

“Please do not plant within my borders,” I beg her. I love the woman dearly. I would much prefer to exchange sweet murmurs with my beloved. Instead, we screech malevolently.

“You do that on purpose!” we each say to the other. But we are not talking about the same things.

I am talking about her scattershot approach to planting. She is talking about my inflexible approach to mowing.

I have suggested in other columns that there is some method to my apparent mowing madness. After she first saw me chomping into her planted perennials, she demanded that I not spend the 20 minutes needed to mow that section of our front yard any longer.

“Why, sure, darling!” I responded. “You can mow it all the time! Far be it from me to stop you from mowing more often (and reducing my mowing time)!”

I should insert an emoji here, but I don’t have the graphic on my computer to convey, “Muwahahaha!”

To preserve her posies, she takes over some of what had been my responsibility to mow.

Any day now, I expect her to issue another ultimatum: “Do not mow along the back sidewalk! You kill my flowers there! I shall mow there for the rest of the summer!”

I shall tilt my head downward in submission, and softly reply, “Yes, dear.”

Then I shall give the walk-behind mower a farewell pat because, aside from oil changes, I shall not need to use it again this summer along the back sidewalk.

Tsk.

Two other swaths of the six or so acres of yard we mow are also off limits for me. Those are the paths between the rows of about 300 blueberry bushes she has lovingly panted over the 15 years that we have lived here together. Originally, she thought about bringing in some extra income via a “pick your own” blueberries business. As the years passed and the bushes slowly grew under her loving care, she also got protective.

In recent years, she alone has picked the blueberries, preserving most of them for our winter use but selling a few quarts here and there. I think she is reluctant to risk pick-your-own customers’ damage to the shoots and stalks she has so lovingly encouraged. I think that, but I do not know that because I avoid asking why she has not begun the “pick your own” blueberry harvesting business.

I content myself with mowing the fields next to, but not between, the rows of blueberry bushes. Those areas, and the rest of our yards, now take fewer than five hours of my time each week, down from the previous six hours.

Five hours is just about all the time I need to joyously reflect on the fruits of my own labors: Kill a flower here, get out of mowing an area there.

What was that sound again?

Ah, yes: “Muwahahaha!”

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.