Cracked yard
08 September 2011 08:37 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I just can’t be bothered to focus on a lawn. It’s hard enough to keep the real plants watered, which is why our two backyard tomato plants – which are actually producing ripe tomatoes before October, a first for my Berkeley garden – are a little dry and why the pumpkin plant – the Jackie Littles my son calls them – has only two pumpkins on it. The cucumber withered, too, a victim of not-frequent-enough watering.
My mother’s father was a keeper of lawns, a cutter of grass. He had a John Deere tractor with a mower attachment and made neat little rows, patterns in the green. He maintained the park grounds by the beach on the Elk River once or twice a week, too, rode the tractor down the road and let it rip around the trees and across the shuffleboard court. I associate him with the bright scent of freshly cut grass (the clumps of it falling off the underside of the mower) and of sweat and sawdust and coffee and cigarettes. The mower’s high pitched growl-whine was a constant summer feature. I turned up the air conditioning and the sound on my TV set in the Little House as the old man whipped noisily around the yard.
My mother kept her yard unmown. It was a meadow in progress, with wildflowers and hopes of beauty, of goldfinches glinting in the summer afternoons and rabbits hiding in the tall grass.
People at Hollywood Beach liked everything tidy, the grass groomed and plants trimmed. Mom’s next-door neighbors, the ones with the Doberman named Babe who snapped at me from the end of her leash, called her yard a shithouse, a comment that was the source of much amusement to us. All my friends mistakenly thought she had burned her brains out in the sixties, that this was just another sign of her hippie hangover when it turned out that she just needed a bit of the wild, a place to stand. There were candlelit discussions with K about yards and the bourgeoisie and money, the way people needed to control with cutters and poisons, the vast expanse of green groomed for croquet and badminton.
A yard wasn’t simply a yard and a silence was always in judgment. There was no way to win between them, so we took our punishment as it was meted.
From the prompt "The lawn."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I've worked with this one a bit, to no avail.
Image of Big Skully in my backyard by me. I don't think the boy was making a commentary on the state of the lawn when he propped the skeleton up on a stick and stuck the stick in a crack in the dirt. He just needed evidence that there were once vicious cyclops in Berkeley.
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