A Chattanooga man decided to make a difference in his area with his lawnmower and weedwhacker, improving his community one good deed and overgrown lawn at a time.
That would be Axel Well, a 34-year-old man in Chattanooga, TN, who owns a professional lawn care service. He saw members of his community were in need and unable to care for their yards or pay someone else to do so, so he broke out his lawn care equipment and went door to door, yard to yard, to mow them. He tries to find people who are down on their luck, such as cancer patients, the elderly, the disabled, and single moms to help, giving them a helping hand by giving their yard a makeover.
Speaking about his good deed to Local 3 News, Axel said, “I just decided to go out and knock on some doors and help as many people as I could. One lawn at a time is my little motto.”
Continuing, Axel added, “I’ll do the ones that haven’t been mowed in like a month or so but I try to find ones that haven’t been mowed in several months or sometimes a year.”
He added that it’s typically because people are somehow down on their luck and unable to take care of their yard that it looks bad, saying, “If their lawn is overgrown, there’s a reason. So I try to find out that story.”
Giving an example of one person he helped and how it made her day, he said, “I did the whole entire yard and when she came out to pay I said ‘it’s on me don’t worry about it’ and she started crying. It was a really, really good feeling.”
In another instance, he cleared a yard of trees that had fallen into it during a tornado, surprising the couple that lived there with his generosity. “I knocked on the door and the guy was like, ‘why would you want to do that?’ When I told him I was going to do it for free he was skeptical but I did it. It took me four days and that’s the video that kind of started it all,” he said.
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And he doesn’t just mow the grass and trim the hedges. Sometimes he does other nice things for the people living in the houses with the overgrown yards as well. “The real excitement comes when I do something extra. Sometimes I’ll give them a hundred dollars or I’ll do mulch or plant some flowers and stuff and that’s when it really gets special,” he said.
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video