CG and the Gravely

Wow. What a vortex down memory lane, to some of the remotest memories.

You see, a neighbor & friend has bought all this old lawn care equipment, all of it Gravely. And I've been sort of helping him shake it down. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. He'd brought the riding tractor down and sure enough, right away, the clutch on the bush hog attachment went bad. Got that back and was still shaking it down when some valve in the engine stuck on open, or something, and now it is getting a new gas tank.

In the meantime, neighbor has brought me the rest of his equipment to see if I can break it, errr, take it for its shakedown cruise. So today I finally got my nerve up and took it on. Big behemouth 16 hp double something engines. In a walk behind model with a 56" deck. Ah, but with this little sulky thing to ride on.

So, there I am, on the sulky. And on there, turning it (and sometimes only trying hard to turn it), with just clutch-like levers to disable one drive wheel or the other (learning that the right side doesn't work so well so turn LEFT most of the time), and the sulky thing getting in a bind trying to break your thigh or mash your thumb either one, learning what position to get my body in to so the machine could turn on a dime (and it can if you can get out of its way before it kills you), I remembered . . . .

That we had one of those when I was very very young. Not so big a deck, and I think the deck was round instead of square. And with that machine, we also had a man who worked for us, mostly mowing. He had a wooden leg courtesy of WWII, no knee joint and really made of wood they said. And his name was Wormy. Isn't that just the best name in the whole world for a man with a wooden leg? And he rode on that sulky and I remembered the odd positions he knew to get himself with his stiff wooden leg into to turn that thing as he mowed our yard.

I think I was under five then. I guess it wasn't too long until my brothers were old enough to mow. And I think old Wormy drank a bit. And it has been a long time since I remembered him but wow, Wormy and the Gravely.

And now, CG and the Gravely! My shoulders are going to be sore in the morning but we've got mulch to use, probably mostly in the melons and squashes area. We'll probably get one more mowing out of the front fields before we let it grow for winter forage.

Almost forgot to mention, another neighbor, the one I mow for, put a garden out for, succumbed to the siren song of Sevin dust and I won't work in that any more this year although I will still mow for her. And I also forgot to mention that I put onion and garlic powder in that squash salad in the last post. I forget to mention that because onion and garlic go in everything. Don't they? They do here.