Talking Southern – Axle-deep to a Ferris Wheel

Your compiler’s late father, who lived from 1939 until 2001, was a stickler about lawn maintenance, averring that nice folks kept nice yards.  His lawn always looked like a golf course or a Southern Living feature,  and he was known to comment scathingly about folks who allowed their yards to become bedraggled and unkempt.

     Your compiler was reminded of that a week or two ago, when nearly daily rainfall, a week-long vacation at the beach, and other commitments conspired to prevent his yard from getting mowed for nearly three weeks.  This was not a huge problem in the front yard, where centipede is the predominate strain, for centipede does not get very tall.   Centipede is in the back yard, too, except for in stripes where the septic lines run, where pernicious crabgrass predominates.  

     It transpired that your compiler looked out into the back yard the other day, and thought of what his late father would have likely said in disgust, “Lord, that stuff’s axle-deep to a Ferris Wheel.”   Obviously there is exaggeration there – just like in last week’s “enough to feed Pharoah’s army” – but it WAS awful-looking and made him think for a minute that perhaps the tractor and bush-hog might do a better and quicker job in the back yard than a finish mower would.

    While your compiler believes that phrase – axle-deep to a Ferris Wheel – might have been his late father’s own invention, the phrase fits nicely into the Talking Southern discussion that occupies us.  After all, his late father was born and raised in Brooks, Georgia, and never lived any further from there than the Classic City of Athens, so he was by nature Southern to the core.   Your compiler’s son may have thought of it, too, as the zero-turn mower choked and sputtered through that overgown crabgrass, which in its striped pattern is an embarrassing monument to more than adequate diet and healthy alimentation.

     The summer of 2025 has seemed to exhibit two alternating weather patterns – a period of rain every day, followed by several weeks with no rain, followed more recently by rain nearly every day. Typically, some of our hottest weather is in September, so it will probably be October before autumn truly begins to settle in temperature-wise, so the pattern may alternate another time or two before then.  And that’s plenty of time to get behind on your mowing regimen.

     Just don’t let your grass get axle-deep to a Ferris Wheel – do try to mow it before it gets that bad!