Special lawnmower (Singapore)

 

When I was growing up, we used to have a kind of grass on our lawn that looks like couch grass.  

    They grow in separate clumps, leaving gaps in between which then become muddy tracks on rainy days, especially during the monsoon season when the rain drops can feel like needles on one's skin, so heavy the downpours are.

    My uncle had procured, for his small front lawn, some lawn grass which looks and feels like a crew cut or the modern astro turf, growing in fine blades that close up all the spaces and are kind to the bottom for sitting on.  We called it carpet grass.

    We cut out a block for ourselves, dividing it up into strips for planting at six-inch intervals, which then grew sideways and met up to form a smooth surface at first.  It'd continue to grow, however, so the mowing still had to be done.

    When I moved on from frogs to guinea pigs for my 'A' level biology dissection classes, I'd go and buy one a week ahead of the lesson, as I had to go to a special street downtown for it.  (Keeping guinea pigs as pets wasn't a common Singaporean hobby in my childhood days – maybe not now either.)

    To keep the guinea pig alive until the next dissection lesson, I decided to set it to work.  After all, I had to go and track down grass for it, so why not just put it out to graze on our carpet grass?

    The only equipment I had for making sure it didn't escape was a half globe, round chicken coop.  Every hour or so, I'd go and shift the coop to another spot.  The lawn ended up with round patches of cropped-down lawn grass, leaving tiny circular triangles of uneaten grass where the circles didn't touch.

    We lived on a main road, so people could see our lawn from the buses that went by.  They would ask what kind of lawnmower we used for producing that effect.

    If I'd known about crop circles back then, I'd have told them that aliens would come down and do our lawn when we were asleep...

(Singapore, 1960s)