Mowing the grass, as you well know, can be a royal pain. But it can also be a pleasant surprise.

About 40 years ago, in one of the first rented houses where my wife and I lived after getting married, there was an old shack in the back. And in that shack, I found an old reel-type push mower with a wooden handle and rusted blades.

I don't know how old the thing was, but it was barely moving. Still, I used that thing to chop down, now and then, the dandelions and other weeds we referred to as the lawn.

It was always a chore, and when we could afford a power mower, I was glad to abandon that old piece of junk.

Back to the present now.

A few weeks ago, I heard from a relative that she was mowing her small lawn in the South with a reel-type mower and found it kind of enjoyable. More than that, it was no big effort.

She must be kidding, I thought at the time. Still, had something happened to those kinds of mowers that made them actually work? I wondered.

Then I was wandering through the Albany Sears with nothing much on my mind one recent weekend. The guy asked me if he could help. Out of the blue, I asked if they had reel-type push mowers.

Sure enough, one of them was sitting there, hard to see among all the shiny power models.

Did they have any in stock? Yup.

Long story short, a couple of hours later I found myself bolting together the three pieces of the steel handle, then slipping the assembly over the lugs provided on the machine.

Tentatively at first, I gave the thing a little shove.

It rolled, practically on its own, down the driveway and onto the lawn.

I could hardly believe my eyes. Started pushing the thing across the grass. And guess what? It doesn't exactly move on its own, but it proves no harder to push than the power mower.

But what a difference!

Instead of the roar of Briggs and Stratton - a roar that requires ear protection lest my incipient hearing deficiency get worse and become full-fledged deafness - the mower gives off a little metallic buzz.

And it stops making even that modest noise as soon as you stop pushing.

The grass in this case was pretty well parched after a summer of little rain and some record heat. It hadn't grown much for some time.

Those factors no doubt made it so easy to do the manual mowing, or trimming.

But later I tried it on some grass that was still green and also a little taller. Here again, the mower moved along with ease. Not much exertion was required.

This seems almost too good to be true: Trimming up the lawn without burning a single drop of gas, without adding a single molecule of carbon dioxide, without obnoxious and ear-damaging noise - and getting a modest amount of exercise at the same time.

And I wasn't even trying to go green. (hh)