I was raised in the suburbs, which means that our house had a yard around it, divided by a white picket fence into a front yard and a back yard. Since the word "paradise" is from a Persian word meaning "enclosed garden," the yard was the mid-twentieth century version of Paradise. Our back yard, appropriately enough, had an apple tree in it, but we never ate the apples: they were too worm-eaten, so we just let them fall on the ground. It was one of my household chores to pick up the fallen apples, put them in a large metal trash can, and lug that out to the street for the trash men to pick up on Tuesdays.
We played croquet in our back yard, and the various yards of the neighbors all had their characteristic shapes and uses: the Armstrongs' yard next door was flat like ours, but had too many extensions from the house jutting into it, a large, free-standing tool shed, and a concrete patio for us to play croquet there, so we made small houses in the dirt border of what little yard was left and called them "Flintstone Villages." Across the street, the Roundys' yard was closely cropped, but the slope was too dramatic for croquet balls to keep from rolling down to the back fence, and the Sachs's yard next to that was profusely wooded, with a flagstone patio jutting up dramatically from the downward slope.
I first became aware of yards' poetic potential when I read the following sonnet from Joachim du Bellay's 1558 collection Les Regrets, which I have translated:
Happy he who, like Ulysses, has travelled well,
or like that one who won the golden fleece,
then returned, of experience and knowledge filled,
to live with his parents the rest of his days!
When will I see, alas, my little town's
chimney smoke rise, and in what season
will I see once more my own small back yard,
which is a province to me, and much more?
More pleasing to me the place built by my own
ancestors than the lavish palaces of Rome,
more than hard marble I love our fine slate:
more my Gallic Loire, than the Latin Tiber,
more my little Lirι, than the Palatine Hill,
and more than sea breezes the sweetness of Anjou!
Of course, Du Bellay has given us a generic "small back yard" -- le clos in the original without many details. This seemed to me an invitation to explore the matter in detail and through details. Reflections on the apple tree I mentioned above led me to a further reflection on the maple tree in the front yard:
Yin Trees
The back-yard apple tree, squat and wrinkled
in my childhood back yard, whose windfall fruit
it was one of my jobs to herd into
piles and transfer into the miniature
trashcan, clearing way for the rotary
mower, fearing the arbitrary force
of gnarled apples propeller-shot sideways,
was the first tree whose lowest branch I could
grasp at its base to haul myself up on
and around and over into the realm
of blossom- and leaf- and fruit-thickened shade,
hidden from those on lawn level. Only
the cool dark maple in the front yard, limbs
with shaved underarms, enticed me, sultry.
These two trees gave me wonderful hiding places during the summertime, when my parents wanted me out of the air-conditioned house and into the sultry but "fresh" Maryland air. I didn't want to play outdoor games very often then, both as it was too hot and I was a klutz at sports, and heat exhaustion plus social humiliation are one too many negatives. I would read in one of the trees, and as I was surrounded by leaves, I was both in the shade and out of sight.
At our first college teaching job, my wife and I rented a small cottage on the property of landowners this was outside of Hartsville, South Carolina, and the landowners not only owned all the surrounding acreage, but had the road named after their family that they had built as newlyweds to be near the wife's parents. When the parents died, the landowners moved into the Big House and rented out the cottage to people like us. We were surrounded by pine woods an acre behind us, uncounted acreage just down the road and fields in which cotton, tobacco, soybeans, and winter wheat rotated. Technically speaking, none of this was a "yard," as it wasn't fenced in, but we got used to the expanse of it around us. It subsequently was hard to adjust to a more "neighborhoody" type of environment:
Claustrophobia in the Yard
The rowhouse I rent features a tiny
back yard I could easily do without.
My last housemate bequeathed a push mower
when she left, and I roll the curved blades o'er
the ragged grasses every other week
or so. There is no tree I could shinny
up and hide the afternoon amid leaves,
and the yard, like a shoebox, is too small
to put a spin on a passing football,
not that I would want to do that, mind you!
Across the road in Carolina stood
an acre plus of undergrowth and wood
where, after therapy, you could go shout
and no one could hear, or, much less, find you.
The last back yard I shared with my then-wife was a magnificent, narrow but deep yard in Carlisle, Pa., where we raised a garden. I have never been a gardener, but she knew how to arrange things and assign me simple, repetitive tasks appropriate for my level of skill: weeding, picking and squashing Japanese beetles off the eggplant leaves, gently harvesting just those zucchini or arugula that are just ripe for consumption. My post-marital garden, now that my industrious housemate has moved out, has reverted to a more lapsarian state:
Back Yard
The back yard comes with the house I live in.
When I shared the rent with someone else, she,
on the Leo-Virgo cusp undoubtedly,
commandeered it as a bit of heaven
that, since Satan possessed the serpent, slid
through its subtle suppleness, forked tongue,
persuaded Eve to trade Eden for dung,
has had to be worked. Work is what she did
to the backyard. I, behind grading, hid.
She graduated, got a teaching job.
I put off looking for a new housemate.
I'd look out on the backyard, neglected.
I drifted through the house in my bathrobe.
I like Nature: leave the yard to its Fate!
Incidentally, the contrast between the well-kept garden and the overgrown back-to-nature yard figures significantly, I discovered, in a novel I have used in courses in recent years: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. If you're interested in seeing a masterful development of that thematic environment, I recommend the episodes of the novel that take place at the mansion out in the country. The Wild has often been the province of the uncouth and the mad, as well as the darkness of the Unconscious in the fairy-tales' Forest. For me to allow the wilds of Nature to return untrammeled to the tiny little enclosed yard behind my rental rowhouse is, at least to some of the neighbors, tantamount to my letting the Barbarians within the city gates.
I do at times sally forth into the back yard. My only front yard is the sidewalk before my house, where the gap between my front stoop and the slanting metal doors into the cellar gives passersby a convenient place to throw papers from the food they buy just up the street, and leaves gather there as well, which means I have to rake the "front lawn" at least three or four times a year over the past years. And in a flurry of applied social responsibility, I mow the lawn, trim the trees, and possibly clear out certain incipient trees or bushes altogether:
Pruning
In spring, the lithe slim green smooth limbs like vines
subtly slip from the amputated trunk
with roots so thick under the cracked cement
and husk so gnarled and meshed with the chain-link fence
that I have never known how to extirpate
the wizened leprous stump from its border sconce,
liminal space between the two back yards,
so as the weather warms I nip off the new,
rubbery and supple, with an inner sheen,
a whiff of my Dad's witch hazel aftershave.
I fight this holding action against change
the crumble and decay impelled by life
holding onto earth, intransigent fat tick
crazy old man devouring his children raw.
Even though I have focused thus far mostly on the back yards of my life, front yards have often had a similarly important function for me, which is socialization. The next-door Armstrongs' front yard was a large, flat, open space except that time they allowed a tree to grow there, just outside the baseline between 2nd and 3rd that is, until I smacked into it head-on as I was rounding the bases. I don't recall whether I spent any time getting medical attention then, but I do remember the Armstrongs' having the tree taken down soon after that.
Now We Are Six
Jody Zeck beat me up when we were six
in the Armstrongs' front yard
I didn't know why she was so furious
at me she had me pinned to the bare
ground where all our touch football
had worn the carpet of grass threadbare
The sky was intensely deep November blue
with brilliant rags of clouds skittering across
I told this to Deke whose yard it was
just last year and he said Oh she beat
you up all the time She was a little
hellion
I have never understood why
women are called the weaker sex
her father I only found out when I was
in graduate school would beat up her
mother whenever he got drunk and
chased the woman around the house with
a naked axe
Don Riggs
Don Riggs studied myth as an undergraduate, the Middle Ages as a grad student (MA, PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill), taught French on the college level, worked as a massage therapist in a holistic health center, and has been teaching English in various places for the last decade and a half.
