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Down through three generations of my family, there has been one constant. When I finally succumb to doing yard work - in a disenchanted and perturbed frame of mind each time since the age of seven - the women in my life leave me alone. They go inside the house or walk away from me, stop talking, and my world goes quiet.

My grandmother, for example, used to ask me to help her rake leaves from her magnolia tree in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The tree is taller than Mount Everest and has more leaves on it than there are grains of sand on America's East Coast.

Every year those magnolia leaves would fall. Before I went to the beach hoping to get some sun and walk the boardwalk to buy funnel cakes, my grandmother would ask me to help her rake those leaves. It seemed that every time I went there was the time for raking those leaves.

On one visit we were out there at 7 a.m. on a day when I had planned to sleep in after battling through my tough daily life back in Washington, D.C., where the world is a struggle, traffic is insane, and intellectual competition is ferocious, and politicians tell half-truths all the time.

But what choice did I have? It was her house in which I was staying. In that sense, she owned me. You can't argue when any host asks you to do housework. You couldn't argue with her anyway, God rest her soul, because when she wanted something to happen, it happened no matter what interference she met such as me suggesting I wanted to lie on the beach instead.

Once I started raking, I got depressed. There were so many leaves. They were like cockroaches that reinvented themselves ceaselessly. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again. Source: Tony Robbins or someone he quoted in one of his mega-seminar speeches.

Once she had me trapped pushing leaves around, she would wander off to another part of the yard and pick weeds from her gardens. Talked ended. She had me going - on the ropes - and didn't want anything or anyone to disrupt the flow.

This same dynamic occurred many times with my mother while living in her house. If she got me to cut the grass, it was striking how she would disappear into the house and not say anything to me. This was unusual because she often spoke to me. I was out in the yard and, like her mother, she didn't want anything to happen to stop me from working. I think she thought conversation, my sight of her, might cause me to complain or debate the need to do the work. She wouldn't allow me to see her. To this day I wonder if she was hiding in the house somewhere so that if I came in complaining, I couldn't be able to find her to engage in any conversation.

Fast forward a few decades. The cycle continues. A few weeks ago my wife unloaded a request that I trim several of our bushes in the front yard. They were overgrown, she told me. I hadn't noticed. I never do when it comes to this sort of thing. The less I know the better.

But I wasn't getting out of this. You can just tell when you are going to lose. She asks if I want to use the old school manual clippers or the electric shaver. At first I think it would be good exercise to use the manual ones. Getting old, I'm concerned about losing my muscle tone. The manual ones could have been good for building my forearms.

This thought left me, however, when I thought about how much easier it would be to use the automatic blades powered by an electric cord.

Once she told me exactly what she wanted done on all the bushes, helping me visualize what was in her mind's eye, suddenly she disappeared into the house. There I was again, alone, in the yard, in the silence, not being talked to, facing the beast, yardwork.

Clipping those bushes turned out to be less fun and more tedious than even I expected. I find that while doing yard work some tool or some bugs or some cobweb always ruin the vibe. This time it was the sweat steaming off my forehead into my eyes. It made them sting like a jelly fish. How much I prefer the beach to yardwork is incalculable.

Even more annoying than the sting-ray sweat was that the plug inserted into the electric clippers outlet would not stay in for more than a few seconds. What a piece of junk. I couldn't get it to fasten in tightly even after trying in earnest, for once, to do something in the yard without asking anyone for help or just quitting before the job was done.

Quitting is not a good habit unless it's quitting yard work. This is my credo.

So every few seconds, after clipping a few bush stems, the clippers would go off. I had to plug it in - again - and push start - again - wipe more acidic sweat from my eyes - again - and clip a few more branches.

Except for the lousy clippers, all was silent.

- Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is a freelance writer who has had more than 1,000 articles published in a wide range of media outlets focused on humor, sports, business, technology and consumers. He has earned master's degrees in journalism and business administration and a bachelor's degree in English and communications.