Dad’s Yard – Jeff Hampton, Writer

By Jeff Hampton

I didn’t notice the truck pull up or the man get out and stand on the sidewalk. In fact, I might have gone on working all afternoon had he not stepped onto the grass and into the path of my lawn mower.

“Need some help,” he hollered over the engine when he finally gained my attention.

“What,” I shouted back, my hand instinctively fiddling with the throttle.

“I said, do you need some help with your yard?” With that, he pointed toward the street. I glanced over and saw an old blue pickup truck loaded down with all kinds of lawn equipment.

I squinted through sweaty eyes a moment, then turned back to him. “No thank you,” I said.

“How about next week,” he tried.

“No thanks,” I said again, and began moving my machine forward. He disappeared from my vision as I returned to the work at hand.

“I’ve got everything under control here,” I thought to myself. “I don’t need any help. Dad never did, and neither do I.”

Dad would never dream of letting someone else take care of his yard, especially not a complete stranger. Dad’s yard was, is, and always shall be his domain. He alone knows what needs to be done, how it should be done, and when.

Dad’s yard has always been a thing of beauty. Tall, lush green grass that is meticulously trimmed around every sidewalk, tree and flower bed. While neighbors scalp their poor yards down to the roots to avoid frequent cuts, Dad sets his wheels at the highest possible position, welcoming twice-weekly cutting sessions if necessary to maintain a thick, rich carpet.

Dad’s only real rival in the lawn business that I ever knew of was his father-in-law, who was a county agricultural extension agent in the tropics of Southeast Texas. Besides all that learned agri-knowledge, he had the advantage of air so moist and heavy, soil so rich and naturally fertile that grass and flowers would grow just about anywhere, including the sidewalks.

Dad had no such advantages in North Central Texas, and so he created his masterpiece with a lot of hard work and determination, not to mention plenty of water and fertilizer.

It could be that his upbringing along the Red River worked to his favor. There, the ground is hard and rocky, and just as prone to sprout thistles and tarantula holes as it is any kind of desirable grass. I was always impressed by an old black-and-white picture of Dad as a young man in the middle of such terrain, shirtless and leaning hard into an old push mower. It looked like tough, primitive labor, and no doubt was good training for the yards he would eventually cultivate on his own.

Like my Dad, I got into the lawn business early. In fact, we kids helped him sod a new yard once on a blistering summer day. Our job was to load the squares of grass into a red wagon and pull it from the front to the back of the house. Only Dad could set the new grass into place. That, and the solemn way in which we all took salt tablets let me know that this yard business was a serious matter.

Later when I was old enough and tall enough to push a mower, I earned a lot of kid’s dollars cutting yards around the neighborhood – all except Dad’s yard. That was still his baby. My friends did their yards while their fathers read the paper or watched television. The scene was reversed at our house. It was rare for Dad to ask me to fill in for him. It usually involved some kind of dire emergency or schedule problem.

Once when surgery sidelined Dad for a month, I was called in to mow backup. I can still see him watching me from the window and eventually pacing along the sidewalk as I tried to do it just the way he did it. I know now that his nervousness was not over how well I was handling his yard. Rather, it was more akin to a major league pitcher who has been put on injured reserve; he’s anxious to get back into the game, to do his part, to do what he was born to do.

I have not always understood Dad’s devotion to his yard. In earlier years, I thought it annoying to be awakened at 7 a.m. on Saturday by a mower screaming outside my bedroom window. And for the first 13 years of my adult life, I was spared the trouble of lawn work by living in dormitories, apartments and condos.

But the past 16 years of life in a real house with a real yard has put me in touch with the hard work, and indeed the pleasure, of yard work. Now, I understand why Dad wouldn’t trade his Briggs & Stratton for anyone’s Rolls-Royce. First, yard work provides the urban dweller with a tenuous but vital link to an agricultural heritage. It is a way to work the land, to turn nothing into something, to transform a patch of weeds into a carpet of beauty and thus something to be enjoyed and appreciated.

Many are the times I’ve watched Dad toil under threat of boiling black clouds and thunder to get that last row mowed before the rain started. With all the intensity of a Kansas wheat farmer, he’d stop occasionally to gaze at the sky, then quicken his pace as if the fate of the family depended upon his St. Augustine harvest.

I too have felt that ancient kinship with the earth while charging across our lot with a little four-horsepower combine, nostrils burning with dust and the odor of freshly cut grass.

Yard work also provides a catharsis, a means of creating order in an otherwise disordered world. There is something soothing to the troubled mind about watching row after row of uneven, ragged grass disappear beneath the mower and emerge as neatly trimmed, uniform blades of green.

Maybe that’s why Dad would waste little time on some weeknights in getting out of his business suit and into his jeans.

“I’ll be just a little bit,” he would tell Mom as he raced out into the yard.

I too have retreated from the turmoil of the workaday world to the yard, where all matters of discord are dealt with in a swift, surgical manner.

Pushing a mower also provides an unparalleled opportunity to do some serious thinking. The loud roar of the engine just naturally turns thoughts inward, and before long you can hear nothing but your own voice. Soon, the eyes, legs and hands are struggling with grass catchers and jammed throttles, while the mind is off on its own, turning the world’s problems into compost.

Dad used to get a little irritated when we kids would try to talk to him over the roar of the engine. He would usually shout something like, “in a little bit,” and continue with his mowing. It took a real emergency to get him to shut off the engine. It occurs to me now that his irritation might have been because he had just latched onto a brilliant idea, and we had disrupted his thought.

It also could be that this love of yard work is hereditary. It’s the oddest sensation, but I feel most like my dad when I am out working in the yard. It’s more than just physical appearance. Oh sure, the old baseball cap gets tilted on my head, the glasses begin to slide down the nose, and I get a twisted, tired expression on my face as the heat and dust take their toll. Voila, I look like Dad.

But that’s just part of it. It’s really more of a thought process, an attitude, a way of doing things. Like Dad, I use plain, basic tools. I prefer a good, sturdy, manual power mower to a fancy thresher/mulcher/self-propelled job; a straw broom to a leaf blower; wood-handled pruning shears to one of those vibrating electric hedge trimmers. We’d rather not have too many impersonal machines get between us and our work.

Another argument for heredity is Dad’s father. At 90 years of age, he threatened to buy a secondhand mower and reclaim control of his yard rather than suffer the ineptness of a hired hand. Almost a century old, and he was still champing at the bit.

That same urge has been passed down from son to grandson. It has me turning away people who may have more time and more equipment, but they don’t have as much heart. To them it’s just another yard. But to me and Dad, it’s our yard, and we know what needs to be done, how it should be done, and when.