As we cross over to Indian Summer, I smell a lot of smoke in the air and see firepits dotting backyard patios up and down my street. They fill our neck of the woods with the smell of charred wood and dropped s’mores caramelizing in the coals.
If I’m up early and make a coffee run before traffic gets crazy, I can peek between properties and notice that the campfires are surrounded by overturned lawn chairs and scattered Styrofoam cups half filled with hot chocolate gone cold. These backyard scenes give evidence of whole families who fell sound asleep right where they were sitting, having succumbed to smokey-thick air the night before. Waking abruptly hours later in pitch dark, they can see their breath, and look down to find parts of grilled hotdogs burning holes through their new plaid shackets.
Quietly, the adults wake each other, but leave their children sleeping, and then wander like some ancient herd of bison back to the warmth and safety of the reservation, where they fall flat onto the nearest couch. I believe this global migration by the Pit-fire People is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science, one that still baffles urban anthropologists and hot dog venders.
Along the back side of our property, I also drag out our portable firepit and sit comfortably, too near it. As my clothes absorb the smoke and ash, memories of burning leaves in the street when that practice was legal are revived from the deep recesses of my brain. When it was legal, the burning piles could be spotted on every street as neighborhood fathers and sons raked their leaves straight from the yard to the fire heap. And in those brisk days between October and November, our parents never worried about us getting too cold when they sent us out to play:
“Mom, I’m headed down to Randy’s!” I’d announce.
“Are you dressed warm enough? It’s cold out there. Do you need gloves?” Mom would ask, looking cautiously down at me.
“No, I’ll be ok. The Fredricks’s have a leaf fire one block over. I can stop there if I get cold.”
“That’s right, I forgot,” mom would say, then add, “Oh, and there’s another one down two blocks at the Greyson’s if you need to stop again.”
And then she’d give me a firm but loving push out the back door, knowing she had good neighbors who could be depended on for a warm and snuggly street fire.
I knew that fall had arrived because our yard turned creamy white, the sign that our special brand of grass, zoysia, was ready for cultivation. The Cold War had raised fears in my father, motivating him to plant an indestructible type of grass that could withstand any possible attack. Being a physician, my dad was also inspired because he was convinced this hardy cultivar was resistant to a variety of ailments such as a leaky gut, scurvy, athlete’s foot, sneezing and Imposter Syndrome. Suddenly, with surgical precision, rolls of abrasive Zoysia were delivered to our yard and stitched together.
The fact that zoysia was disease resistance also meant that it grew at an unstoppable rate, sending out hundreds of invasive feelers that looked like scary centipedes from some cheesy horror movie. Inching along like a heat rash, those feelers spread quicky, dispatching new fingers that eventually transformed our neighbors’ beautiful Bluegrass lawns into patterned, white zoysia islands.
Miss Lowenbach, a retired neighbor lady formerly employed by the city to chair the Civil Defense Unit did some research on zoysia and brought my father a picture of a runner in Australia that had grown under four lanes of highway and popped up back up on the other side. I don’t know anything that can cross four lanes of highway and live to tell about it, let alone do it underground, but Miss Lowenbach’s photo was enough for her to suggest that zoysia might pose a real threat to her yard and to the safety of the city in general, if not the entire continent of Australia.
This new information only served to reinforce my father’s passion for his wonder-grass, The Zoysia, as he called it. To show off the grass’ toughness my father could often be seen out in the front yard practicing his golf swing and taking out huge chunks of the zoysia, which would often travel further than the wiffle balls. Back and forth he walked across the yard to fetch the upended patches, then carry them back to the spot he had assaulted with his golf club. HIs savage practice of breaking up chunks of earth with his pitching wedge, which would be the sure death of any other grass, had no effect on the zoysia. None whatsoever. It was so hardy it could have grown in mid-flight, and probably did grow, as the yard seemed to be bursting at the seams with layer upon layer of healthy, luscious grass.
“How do you keep your lawn looking so healthy?” A passersby would ask. Taking an extra-long backswing for effect, my father would stop mid-swing and point his nine-iron straight to the ground.
“Isn’t it great! It’s Zoysia! The Zoysia!” he would cheer as if he’d won a lottery.
I found the basket of wiffle balls in the garage and noticed they had begun to grow tiny green hairs, taking on a greenish cast as the zoysia began to colonize. As luck would have it, my discovery came just prior to a deadline on a science project, and I took one of the wiffle balls to class to explain how our earth looked from outer space, green and distant and pocked with green wiffle holes from meteor strikes.
In the background however, sweat poured off me as I leaned into the job of mowing through what felt like was a shag carpet of Venus fly traps. I dispelled any thoughts that mowing the grass was cruel and unusual punishment, knowing my efforts would soon be paying off. With fall around the corner, my father would soon be involving us in his dethatching and aeration schedule, which to me simply meant he would allow my brother and I to set fire to the front yard, unsupervised. I now believe that my father, being a urologist, thought of this process in medical terms, and that our garden hose, like part of our urinary system, could be employed at any moment to relieve any fires that got out of control.
One calls into question the sanity of a parent that would allow his children to light matches will-nilly, and in this case, in full public view of his neighbors. It is possible that dad believed that burning the white zoysia, like a forest fire, would regenerate enough new centipede feelers that he could open a zoysia farm someday and let the super grass sell itself.
Nonetheless, a yard full of zoysia had given my father an unhealthy confidence, an overly aerated ego resistant to any type of local gossip. Zoysia had slowly gained that kind of power over him. It wasn’t anything any of us noticed right away, mind you, like a smelly shirt that had hung over a chair for too long. No, this was more subtle than that, an imperceptible change that took over him just as the zoysia began to turn white in the fall, demarcating the borders of our yard as an area of prestige and status.
At six years old I knew of course that fire was dangerous and had probably experienced a burn or two myself. But never mind that, our father had waived any safety lectures about fires, and happy to see us so excited, handed my brother and I our very own unopened box of matches. As we ran out the door into the Land of Zoysia, similar to the Land of Goshen, we did the 1960’s version of a high-five, which was to light a match on our way out.
“Out you go!” Dad would laugh, “Have fun! Don’t let any grass grow under your feet!”
The world was our oyster. We had our fire, and we had our zoysia, and the lawn was ripe for incineration.