The Full Suburban: Logan Ditto purchases his dream machine – a riding lawn mower
Logan was finally able to fulfill a lifelong dream of his last week by purchasing, at long last – drumroll, please – a riding lawnmower. This might seem like a small feat to many, but it has been his white whale for quite some time now.
When we first got married, and then for several years after that while Logan finished up dental school, we lived in apartments and had no lawn. With our first house came a tiny front and back yard that could probably be trimmed, in its entirety, by hand with a pair of toenail clippers in about 30 minutes. A push mower handed down to us from my grandma did the job just fine.
And then five years ago, we built the house we’re living in now. The lawn isn’t exactly massive; we’re not talking football fields worth of grass or anything. But it’s big enough that, in order for it to get mowed each Saturday, it needs to be divided among our older kids into four hotly contested zones, which they then fight over.
Why? Because at least one of the zones is infinitesimally bigger than another and thus totally unfair, and then they all grumpily mow their section while taking turns with the push mower. Staying on top of it took the better part of the day, a task that almost always fell to Logan. Finally, he’d had enough.
“I want to buy a riding lawn mower,” he announced (yet again) one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. “It would save so much time, and if we get one that’s heavy-duty enough, I’ll be able to mow parts of the field that I usually have to use the tractor for.”
I glanced up from the newspaper I was reading, one eyebrow raised. “A riding lawn mower? Who are we, the Rockefellers?” I asked. “Using a push mower is good for the kids. Annoying tasks build character.” “Yeah, well, they can build character while sitting on a riding mower, too,” he replied.
After a few minutes of discussion, I relented. The one thing in the world the poor man wanted was a tiny little tractor he could ride around like a race car; I decided to let him have the win. The next Friday, I arrived home from running errands to find him gleefully maneuvering a shiny black and orange lawnmower around the front yard, cutting the grass at breakneck speed.
He mowed the front yard and then the back, finishing in 20 minutes what would normally take our kids three hours to do. I went inside the house to talk to the kids about their day at school, and he started mowing our overgrown and normally inaccessible front hill.
Half an hour later, I glanced out the window and saw him riding around down by our mailbox, cutting the wild grass near the side of our driveway. He stayed outside in hyper-lawn focus for the next five hours mowing various patches of vegetation, edging the lawn, adjusting sprinkler heads and blowing clippings off the driveway.
The kids and I moved in and out of his orbit as we went through our night. I ordered pizza, filled squirt guns, broke up fights and started the kids on a Friday night movie, all while Lawnmower Man remained outside blissfully in his element. I was amused and honestly a little jealous; the last time I was able to concentrate for five hours on any one single task was when I gave birth.
“Hey, sorry I was out there so long,” Logan said sheepishly when he finally came inside after dark, dinner put away and the little boys tucked into bed. “I just … I couldn’t … oh man, that lawnmower is so awesome!”
He looked like a little boy who’d just shot his first BB gun, and it was impossible for me to be too annoyed with him. “The lawn does look amazing,” I said as he put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “I’m so glad we got a riding lawn mower so we could share this special moment.”
“There’s more where that came from,” he whispered softly. “Tomorrow, I’m going to install the bagger attachment.”
Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.