In Their Season 7 comments

By Caroline Langston

Last week my husband raked up 25 bags of leaves from our yard, then stacked them in a neat, impressive row along the front sidewalk for the local Public Works guys to pick up the following morning. Our lone bell pepper plant gave up its last two offerings. Palm-sized and pendulous, they came right off the stem into our hands, and we watched the five-year-old bite into one as gleefully as if it had been an apple. Blackbirds are pecking the bald grass, making me think, once again, of the “bare ruined choirs” of Shakespeare’s sonnet.

But the purple grocery-store mums are flourishing, against all expectation: I’d always bought a couple of pots to decorate with pumpkins along the front stairs—that suburban fall cliché—and they’d always de-flowered and promptly died. This year, though, I took them from the pots and sunk them into the earth of the modest planters that flank my front door. Now the thistly-colored blooms are poking out all over the plants, which desperately need trimming.

This is the first house that my husband and I have owned, and the first yard that’s ever been under our care. So perhaps it is natural that each small labor we accomplish makes me recall my first yard, the large lawn behind my childhood home, a solidly middle-class, pine-paneled Cape Cod, in Yazoo City, Mississippi. (Barely a block, coincidentally, from the home of my fellow Good Letters blogger Kelly Foster).

My parents built the house in 1954, though I wouldn’t arrive on the scene for another 14 years. At the back of the yard, behind a Cyclone fence, were the tracks used by the Illinois Central-Gulf Railroad, and several times a day, the train whistle would sound and the house would shake for a minute or two as the south- or northbound train would thunder past on its way to New Orleans or Memphis. That’s an inconvenience, it often occurs to me, that no new homebuilder now would ever put up with.

But what fascinated about the yard was the way my father had cultivated it, drawing from his 1920s rural upbringing, when a yard was not just ornamental. At the back, on the left, he’d planted an apple tree, then a pear tree on the right. The middle ground of the yard was dominated by two pecan trees that, by the time I showed up, were tall and black and shed mountains of leaves in the fall along with raining pecans.

At last, closest to the house, and improbably underneath the giant chrome infrastructure of the analog television antenna, was a tender fig tree whose slick fruits often fell to the ground and got squashed. I remember their sticky pulp threading through my barefoot toes.

This set-up never worked exactly the way that, in the old family-farm kind of way, it was supposed to do. The little green apples were bitter and never amounted to much. The pears grew heavy and golden but all too often were dented or wormy, although my brother tells me that my mother used to make preserves from them. The fig tree eventually stop yielding fruit altogether (though maybe the TV antenna had something to do with that).

By far the most successful were the pecan trees, a gift that truly kept on giving, and the small tree that my father used to raise fat black Catawba worms for fishing bait. After my father died and my mother became a recluse, the whole yard became a mysterious and overgrown ruin.

No matter. Even as a kid, I loved seeing the seasons change: the pinkish-white blooms of spring that presaged the little green apples, dangling from the tree’s thin limbs in garlands. The meaty pears that grew, grew, and grew through the hot summer: in August, I could fill a dozen Jitney Jungle shopping bags with heavy fragrant fruit. Then, in fall, another dozen Jitney Jungle bags would be brimming with pecans we would shell by the fireplace, eating them as we watched TV. Even in the yard’s later years of neglect, the seasons were glorious.

Later, when I read Genesis—“Then the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden...[and] caused every tree beautiful to the sight and good for food to grow from the ground”—it was our own humble backyard that always came to mind. Even after the expulsion from Eden, we can still raise fruit by the sweat of our brow—imagine.

It’s what I think about now, looking at my own imperfect, middle-class yard, thinking patriarch as I look at my husband, his arms strong and wiry from raking, and our son jumping joyfully in the leaves.