Summer in Paradise, Then and Now

I live in a 1956 ranch on an acre in a small New England town. There is a protected wetland on one side, a forest in the back bordered by an ancient stone wall, and a neighbor on the other side. No sidewalks.

🌱 The grass is mature, thick, and deep-rooted, leaving little room for interlopers, just the occasional sturdy dandelion and the clumps of sweet buttercups. The clover throughout adds a refreshing variety of green, the whimsical shape so pleasing.

One of my granddaughters takes on the project of clearing crabgrass from the flowerbeds. It’s mostly easy to do, but the trowel should be handy just in case. She loves the little ripping sounds as she pulls the crabgrass out of the ground.

If there is a dry spell, the DPW imposes water restrictions, but in any case, I don’t pull water from the reservoir to improve my lawn. Summer thunderstorms do the job nicely. I maintain a small vegetable patch that requires daily watering, but that’s for agricultural purposes and so it’s allowed.

🌻 Over the years, I’ve expanded the perennial flower and shrub beds surrounding the house into the organic shapes that I favor. I am partial to clearly defined outlines, thanks to my favorite garden tool, the half-moon edger, that slices into the earth with a kick of my heel. While I tend to my chores, power mowers and weed-whackers buzz in the distance, the neighborly chorus that starts up early Saturday morning.

I dug out a large circle around the red maple on the side of the house to expose the flares at the root-line. My pet peeve is the “volcano” of mulch that some landscaping services build around the base of young trees, climbing a foot up the trunk for decorative purposes (and to sell more mulch, I suspect). The bark rots off underneath and the flares extending from the base do not receive the aeration and hydration needed to thrive.

🌳 I have liberated all such beleaguered trees on the property. My Inner Arborist has emerged and triumphed.

My stepson Zimri brings his Boston Terrier here for an occasional vacation. During the year, Archer is confined to an Upper East Side apartment and the Small Breed Section of an urban dog park. Here, she leaps over the threshold and into action for her morning run, careening tirelessly around the corners of the house, then stretching and rolling to cool off in the wet grass.

Some of my best memories of childhood took place in my grandparent’s backyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Grandpa Weiner was a union mason and built the brick steps to the back, front, and side doors. He stored his masonry tools in the single-car garage, a rickety wood structure with two doors that opened wide, an old-fashioned design. Two sidewalks formed the driveway, with a strip of grass growing in between, the way it was before suburbia got paved over. The kind of place where you’d expect to see a rusty pickup full of tools—Grandpa’s truck.

The grass in the small yard was sparse and mostly crab, but his tomato patch flourished. I sat with my girl cousins, Donna and Sherry, on mismatched lawn chairs and wiled away the lazy summer days until Grandma  called us in for supper at five. No barbecues—even in a heat wave, dinner meant brisket and roasted potatoes coming out of a hot oven, or a hamburger with onions sizzling in oil that sparked up from the cast iron frying pan. Then, she’d shake french fries in a brown paper bag till it became spotted with grease and pour them onto our plates. Grandma’s meals, always tasty with some form of gravy, never disappointed.

We stayed in the yard for as long as we could, catching fireflies at dusk but getting mosquito bites too. We slept over for the weekend and talked into the night, pretending we were movie stars. Grandpa had installed wooden screens with the hook and eye latches on the bottom so we could keep the windows open wide and hope for an occasional breeze to make its way to inland New Jersey.

What I love most about my own backyard is watching my grandchildren run back and forth through the sprinkler, screeching with glee as they cool off in the blazing sun. My little grandson lives in New York City and my granddaughters visit from the desert environment of Israel—this is their chance to feel a magic carpet of grass under their bare feet.

Maybe my grandparents thought the same as Grandma watched us from her station through the kitchen window and Grandpa looked up from his weeding in the tomato garden.

You won’t find a “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” sign here. Instead, welcome—children, adults, cousins, pets, plants, and international travelers—to the pleasures of summertime on the Levine Lawn.