Ask people what they love best about summer, and often, you get to hear something about the smell of fresh-cut grass on a Sunday morning.
Lawn mowing happens to be the essential American growing-up experience.
You can't quite consider yourself as having had a normal childhood if you haven't had a parent scream at you to go get the lawn mower when all you ever wanted was to be left alone to go out with your friends.
For such an all-American rite of passage, lawn mowing certainly injures lots of people - a quarter million adults and children every year.
Lawn mower injuries to children usually occur to them at around the age of 12; the injuries can be lacerations, burns, fractures, severed fingers and all other horrors.
To any doctor-in-training, learning about lawnmower injuries happens to be such an important part of the learning experience.
One of the most common ways for lawn mowing accident to occur happens to be when a person on a ride-on machine backs up and runs over a child standing there.
When one of these machines runs over child, it's easy to see how a child off-balance, sprawled on the ground, can get hurt.
All one would need to do would be to poke a hand under the mower in the fuss and get it chopped off.
It's about time we stopped thinking of the lawnmower as a fun toy and a part of the American experience.
It's a frightening machine that injures and maims children; the worst part of it is that no one recognizes lawn mowing for what it is.
Children's welfare groups rejoiced earlier this year when there were news reports about how plastic turf was the material of choice this year over natural turf.
They don't need to be cut.
And that's a few less injured children.
If you do have a lawn and you need to get your child to mow it, make sure that the child is at least 16 (for a ride-on mower).
Make sure that children don't a ride along with someone else; and make sure that they wear proper shoes and not flip-flops or anything.
When there is someone mowing the lawn, children not involved in the job or not to be allowed within 25 feet of the mower.
The mowing person can easily forget to keep track of where the child is.
If the child happens to be close by when one backs the mower up, that's an accident waiting to happen.
In fact, a great idea would be to never, ever move a mower in reverse.