I dread Thursday mornings.
Not because it’s the end of my midweek “weekend,” a consequence of being low person on the totem pole of the newspaper copy desk, but because Thursday is the day when my neighborhood erupts into a cacophony of sound from 7:30 in the morning until mid-afternoon.
It’s “lawn-care” day at the town house development I live in.
Now I’m all for good lawn care, and admire those who can make grass grow, because I sure as heck can’t, but in this modern day and age of high-speed Internet access, hybrid vehicles and automatic cat-litter boxes, can someone tell me just why we have to have lawn maintenance equipment that can wake not only the living, but the dead as well?
Every Thursday, it’s the same thing: An infernal racket of various tools, each louder than the last, powered by two-cycle gas engines that, when revved for cutting, turn bucolic quiet into an urban nightmare.
The worst is that, for a grand finale of sorts, the crews then fan out with blowers that are loudest of all to blow the clippings back into the grass or, failing that, onto any cars that are around.
It’s also bad for the lawn service people, many of whom walk around wearing hearing protection and sometimes walk into the street, unaware of cars that might be passing by.
Some communities are fighting back with noise ordinances or prohibitions against early morning or evening lawn work, but a better way would be to invent quieter equipment.
If we can hit a comet with a space probe, can’t we invent something to quiet all this lawn equipment?
Vincent F. Safuto works for a newspaper in Florida, and occasionally turns up on his brother Robert’s podcasts.
