I was raised in a home where yard maintenance was pretty important. My dad kept an immaculate lawn, with trimmed shrubs, lots of flowers, a weedless vegetable garden and tidy woodpile in the shed.

As a kid I could care less.

I mowed to get it done – not so it looked amazing.

He’d cringe when he’d come home and rather than doing the perfectly straight lines back and forth on the tractor, I basically mowed in a square. Then I’d blast through the trim work with a push mower, cutting most of what I should, probably.

Well, fast forward five decades and I’m now a bit of a lawn freak too.

I now do the perfectly straight back and forth swaths too and trim pretty meticulously – looking for the “your lawn looks great” compliments he always got.

So what, you say?

Well, I was going to be gone for 22 days in the summer when the lawn grows fast. That’s at least three mowings. A longtime friend offered to mow it, but my wife said she’d get someone to do it.

I felt guilty that I was adding another thing to her plate. She already had pool maintenance duties, which I always do. She now had daily dog walking duties (I usually do four days a week) and all the normal house stuff.

Oh, and our home is the maple seed capital of the area. We’re surrounded by monstrous maple trees and those whirlybird, helicopter seeds simply coat our lawn and pool, adding another unpleasant chore she isn’t used to.

She was also working full-time, while I was traveling the countryside having a blast with our kid.

But back to the lawn.

I gave her an out with that friend who offered to help, but she shunned that, saying she’d deal with it.

Well, apparently the guy she initially hired to mow our lawn flaked and didn’t do it.

And the days kept passing.

And the lawn kept growing.

And my wife, love her to death, but she doesn’t really care much about the lawn anyway.

A couple weeks into the trip I got a text from the friend asking me again if I was sure we didn’t want him to come take care of the lawn because it was basically blowing in the wind, um, like hay grass.

I checked with her and she said no, that another guy was coming.

She swore about it and said the lawn was driving her nuts. I felt guilty.

Eventually, lawn guy number two got it mowed and cleaned up nice. I’m not sure what she paid him, and didn’t ask. It was off my plate at that point in the trip.

 It was ready to be mowed again when I got home and I was ready to mow it.

And one bright spot, I think she had a new appreciation of the volume of maple seeds I cleaned up annually for two decades.