LETTERS FROM HOME: WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS, AND LIFE AND DEATH IN THE BACK YARD

Feb. 18, 1999

Dear Patty,

As I drive through town hoping to spy a goat-footed balloonman or some other harbinger of spring, yards that are flawless even in their winter nakedness sometimes make me wish ours looked more like a page from Home and Garden magazine and less like a scene from "The Grapes of Wrath."

I exaggerate, as usual. We have grass in spots. I dream of a luxuriant zoysia lawn like my dad's but would have to do a clear cut to get enough sun. We have lots of trees, many so old you have to watch out for falling branches in a low wind.

I like these trees. They shelter the squirrels Hank and Lucy chase and the owl we hear at night and the other birds that swarm our backyard feeders these days.

Keeping the bird feeders stocked is a daily job. Word travels quickly in the world of eat or die. By the time I returned to the kitchen this morning, four cardinals were taking turns at the sunflower seed feeder, sparrows were buffet grazing at the mixed-seed feeder, and pigeons and squirrels were mopping up the crumbs on the ground.

DC's Audubon clock next to the window signals the hours with the same calls some of those outside birds make. She can name some of the birds by their calls. I recognize the hoots at noon and midnight.

Mostly, the yard is the way it is because we are the way we are.

The upside-down plastic pool will be righted one warm day soon in time for Hank and Lucy's outdoor bath season. The wrought-iron table without the top has been in the same location so long its absence would create a void.

For some reason, DC has hung her pottery misfits from a tree next to the bench at the back of the yard. It looks like a wind chime or a mobile in progress. DC says it's a pottery tree.

Put up a good front for the neighbors, I say, but a back yard ought to belong to the beings inhabiting it.

At the end of the driveway is a patch of land where DC insists on letting the grass and weeds grow tall. She calls this her wilderness refuge. We know rabbits live there, at least.

Hank and Lucy ran up to DC in the yard one day dangling from their mouths what appeared to be the fingers of gloves. Instead they were the bodies of baby rabbits.

She called both me and then her mother crying. Mother said, Get hold of yourself. I said, Breathe deeply, this is what dogs and rabbits are meant to do in this world. She doesn't accept it.

One night this week, DC returned home from throwing pots to find Lucy standing in her headlights in the driveway, skittish as a wild animal.

The next morning, we found a hole that had been gnawed in the fence. Headline in Lucy's world: Big jail break thwarted. This time. Despite the Prozac, Hank hadn't gone along.

A back yard is a world within worlds. Like a piece of Chinese sculpture, a delicately carved sphere containing progressively smaller ones, each world appears smaller or larger than another, but the creation craves them all.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.