I can totally relate to the original post. I was the rare kid who actually loved mowing the lawn and even opted to use a push mower instead of the brand-spanking-new John Deere rider that my dad bought. After I graduated college and started renting a home I kept mowing an ever larger piece of land. Maybe it was just the farm kid in me that felt a sense of accomplishment looking over the straight, parallel rows of mowed grass. It was just so nice to look out over rolling acres of fresh-cut grass and take pride in a job well done.
Few years later and I attended a Superbowl party at a buddy's house and he and his wife a big into prairie restoration. At first I just thought they were crazy hippies that went a little overboard with the whole 'back to the land' thing, but that fall they invited me over to help them with a prairie burn. As the closet pyro in me took a thrill in stomping out wayward fires, they explained that each year they burn a little farther into the vacant field next door because it destroys the reed canary grass and restored beneficial native grass and forbs. The concept intrigued me that left to it's own devices nature will find the correct balance to restore the health of the land. Insect problems are reduced as spiders and dragonflies return. Water runoff, soil erosion, and drought are no longer major issues. I was completely hooked on prairies and the large expanses of mowed grass that once appealed to me now seem like such a needless expenditure of time and resources.
Now that I have my own place I don't really have the time and money to do a full-blown prairie restoration. Yes, I still mow a half acre of my five acre property (most of the rest is woods) but I've started to focus on growing more edible garden plants and I've replaced the ornamental flowers with native, low maintenance woodland and grassland plants. Eventually I'm hoping to let these patches of native plants expand into the yard and gradually displace the lawn. I even purchased a decent electric lawn mower and I've found that the greatly reduced noise levels and complete lack of gasoline fumes make mowing even more enjoyable.
The one major problem is that my free-range chickens do quite a bit of damage to a lot of the native plants so for now I've put nearly invisible deer fencing around the native areas and I'm hoping that once they're more established there won't be so many issues.
