Great Expectations

Last year, the local hardware store had weedeaters on sale.  I got to talking with my neighbor about them, and she said she found them very useful but she didn’t currently have one that she could use.  (Her husband had one that was too heavy for her).  So, we decided to go in as partners on a light-weight, inexpensive weedeater.  And we did, but the hardware store had to back order it and by the time it actually arrived we were into the fall and rain and there didn’t seem all that much point in using it.  And then she unexpectedly moved away and delivered it unto me last fall as a parting gift.  I now appear to be the sole owner of this joint enterprise.

Never out of its box, it perched through the fall and winter on a shelf in the gardening shed.  I thought about it occasionally this spring, but I really didn’t feel like figuring out how it worked.  How could she have just moved away and left me on my own with this problem?  That seemed the right response to it.

However, yesterday, I decided to take on the learning challenge because there are lots of little flower garden areas in my yard that are bordered with bricks and the wild grasses in front of them get quite tall and are hard to pull up by hand because their roots are so dense.  The WeedEater would surely be the tool to address this problem.  So I found the box, opened it, read the instructions, largely to find that there aren’t many instructions except to wear safety glasses and high boots.  I have safety glasses but I don’t own high boots so I just had to assume I could pay attention to where I was putting my feet.

I put the two parts together after studying the picture on the front of the box for awhile.  I read that I am to move from right to left, although left to right seems more natural for me.  I got out the long extension cord and, while plugging it into the machine, managed accidentally to turn it on.  No damage, though, because I was watching my feet from behind my safety glasses (instead of watching where I was putting my hand).

Undaunted, I rearranged it and me and intentionally turned it on.  I moved it from right to left, and all the very wet grasses leaned over and kind of flopped into the flower bed behind the brick edging.  Not so much cut as bruised.  Somehow, I had thought this would work more like a vacuum cleaner with a knife edge; that I would kind of push it along next to the brick edging and everything on this side of the brick edging would fall toward me.  Apparently not.  And the noise.  That had not even occurred to me.

I kept at it for awhile: tried it in a few other places with different weeds and managed, inadvertently, to cut down two rose campion plants.  Cut them very neatly, I might add.  Maybe this is not so much a grass/weed eater as a flower stalk/weed eater.  I think I need to have a weed eater wizard demonstrate his/her skills so that I could figure out what this is supposed to be good for.  And if there is any way it could do it a little more quietly.  And I am not even going to talk about the manufacturer’s idea that I am going to be cleaning out the underside of the ridge-sculpted shield, then washing it with detergent to remove thoroughly all traces of the grass paste that is permanently attached to the plastic, not forgetting to dry it with a soft cloth.