Like so many other office-dwelling people my age, I have too much lawn and too little time. Fortunately, Dave from down the street can operate every kind of machine, from leaf blowers to industrial cranes, and he stops by our place once a week for about 20 minutes and mows, trims, and blows the grass off the walks. It would take me hours to do a much worse job. Because Dave is Master of the Machines, he makes me Lord of the Lawn for a very fair price.

As Lord of the Lawn, however, there is a great temptation to place myself above it all, barely noticing the living worlds beneath my feet as I tramp out to the gardens or the barns or the compost bin in the course performing other chores for which I am not yet lord but merely a serf with aspirations. But on fine summer days, when the cup of the sky is filled with Rorschach clouds, circling hawks, and darting dragonflies, I lower my exalted self to the lawn to lie on my back to take it all in. From that position, I can hear what Tennyson called “musical hounds of the fairy king” — bees working the white clover.

On the scale of existential pleasure, summer afternoons have exalted rank. Edith Wharton went so far as to declare: “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the most beautiful words in the English language.”

But as the sun beats down on the cold-hardened inhabitants of New England, it becomes clear that there are degrees of pleasure for a summer afternoon.

The enhanced summer afternoon involves a hammock, a cool, light drink, and a hot and heavy novel. As for that same afternoon spent bent over under the hot sun, sweating and swatting at biting insects, pulling weeds from the garden beds and walkways? Not so much fun. But even within the not-so-fun experience of weeding under a hot sun, there are still degrees of pleasure.

Pulling those knuckle-pricking thistle stickers among active anthills ranks at the bottom of the weeding pleasure spectrum. And at the top is pulling purslane.