A Lawn As Big As Botswana

Hey y'all here's an excerpt from an essay I've been writing about my mom and dad and growing up in the 70s. Let me know what you think!

In those days, kids were seen primarily as a source of cheap labor. We washed cars and swept driveways and—in my case—mowed the lawn. We had a big, lush, man-eating lawn. It was, to my eleven-year-old eyes, about the size of Botswana. And that wasn’t even the main problem. We lived twenty miles south of Houston. Every year the sun would descend from the heavens in April like an angry god to float just above the refinery stacks in nearby Baytown and super-heat the atmosphere to a consistent ninety-seven degrees, just warm enough to entice the rich aromas of benzene and toluene from the steel tanks. This, combined with the prevailing eighty percent humidity—roughly the same level as a marathoner’s sweat socks—meant that St. Augustine grass grew at alarming, inexhaustible rates. As did the fire ant beds. And the swarms of ravenous, sparrow-sized mosquitoes. There was a section of our side yard that was slightly lower than the rest and frequently wet as a result. This is where the crawdad chimneys were located—and the crawdads, presumably, though they always had enough sense to stay underground while I was mowing. A crawdad, incidentally, is a small, reddish-brown, lobster-like creature that thrives in the warm, rainy climate of the Gulf Coast. In drier weather it burrows down into the earth to find moisture and the soil it excavates forms a sort of funnel sticking up to mark its abode. The burrows weren’t a serious menace; they were just glutinous enough to clog the mower and slow me down. Thus there would be days when, by the time I finished the front yard, both side yards, and the backyard, it would be time to mow the front yard again. I was like Sisyphus, only instead of a huge rock I was pushing a three and half-horsepower Craftsman lawnmower and being chased by wasps. Over the years I happily donated approximately four hundred square feet of property to our neighbors, the Smiths and the Geehans, in a vain attempt to get someone else to mow the damn grass. All my donations were politely declined. I feigned illness. I lost parts. But here’s the problem with having an engineer for a dad. Equipment failure was not an option. My dad could fix anything. So even if the lawnmower wouldn’t start, there was no cause for celebration. Maybe I wasn’t pulling the cord hard enough. Maybe the fuel line was clogged—easy enough to repair. Or maybe someone had removed the spark plug and hidden it under the left rear tire of the Chevy until the Astros game was over and the sun was no longer an imminent threat to my postpubescent health and sanity. No problem there either—my dad always had a few extra plugs lying around.