I was working in my yard this weekend.  I gave up my gas mower some time ago.  Did you know that a gas lawn mower puts out like four times as much pollution as a car?  Yikes!  My weed-eater though… I have not been able to give it up.  I can’t explain it.  Maybe it is the satisfying weeeeeeeeee as it first starts or the guttural crunching as it whips through the long grass around our garden boxes. Whatever it is, I find it very therapeutic.

Well, Saturday I was grunting our push mower (you know, with the spinning cylinder of blades) up and down the hill-yard and weedying (is that a word?) all around the garden boxes.

Our weed-eater is old.  It is an entry-level model.  Not that powerful or well designed.  We got it some years ago as a hand-me-down from a friend who didn’t need it anymore.  As you might expect, it doesn’t always work that well.  And sometimes it can be down-right infuriating.

On this occasion the plastic line was fighting me the whole time:  snapping off every five seconds and knotting up inside the mechanism.  Its knots are a plastic fused demonic nest.  A twenty minute chore was quickly stretching into an hour.

I finally got pissed. I had knotted for the sixth time.  The repeated weeeeeee was no longer intoxicating the crunching no longer satisfying. I thought to myself, “This is what you deal with when you are poor!”  My assumption was that if we had more discretionary income we could go out and buy tools that work like they are supposed to.  At the very least I could buy a more emotionally satisfying weed-eater.

However, as soon as that thought entered my mind, “this is what you deal with when you are poor,” a second thought slipped in right behind it.  The first thought I am sure came from my heart.  I am not sure where the second thought came from.

The second thought was quiet.  I could have easily missed it.  The second thought said, “Do you realized that  you own a machine which has only one purpose: to whack down long grasses.”

My heart responded without pause, “Maybe I need to rethink my definition of ‘poor’.”

Now, there is a thought.

Gratitude followed.