[First Draft]
With my future employment assured in Tacoma, I turned my attention to the new experience of home ownership. Our south-facing house, in the terraced neighborhood known as The Avenues, took the full brunt of Salt Lake’s high desert summer sun. Afternoons, I took to resting on the porch in the 95-degree heat, sipping on a gin-and-tonic and contemplating the profusion of plastic tricycles which had sprouted.
Most of the neighbors had at least one child between age four and eight among the five or so which made up the typical LDS family. And each kid had his or her own Big Wheel. They’d madly pedal along the sidewalks, the grinding of rigid wheels drowning out the cacophony rising up from the downtown streets below us.
Weekends, even the Big Wheels were eclipsed by a phalanx of gas-powered mowers giving haircuts to the tiny lawns lovingly manicured along Seventh Avenue. Our next-door neighbor noticed I was not participating in the parade and asked if I had a lawn mower.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “we lived on a hill like this. We had one of those push mowers – I don’t know how to work the gas ones. I thought maybe I’d just let the lawn stay natural. It doesn’t rain much here, right? The grass shouldn’t grow very high.”
He looked at the dandelions beginning to turn from yellow flowered tops to wispy fuzzballs, about to drift over his own immaculate fertilizer-fed green carpet. “You know, they make electric mowers now. They’re quiet, easier to use. Your yard isn’t that big – a 75-foot extension cord would be all you need.”
His smile looked pleasant enough, but I knew he didn’t want the house next to his looking like the one across the street. Several motorcycles were parked askew, their greasy droppings lending an eerie desolation to the browned-out front “lawn”.
Two days later, I drove to the nearest Sears and bought a Craftsman electric mower and extension cord. In fifteen minutes, I’d chopped down the unruly locks of our front yard. The hardest part was pushing the whirring machine at a tilt along the severe slope separating the upper terrace from the lower.
I found a hose in the shed out back, and hooked up the rotating sprayer I picked up at Sears along with the mower. I placed it on the sidewalk bisecting the yard from the Avenue up to our porch, adjusting the angle of the spray to a 180-degree semi-circle covering the entire yard. I retreated to the porch, and rested in the swinging bench suspended from the ceiling by two chains, which squeaked in unison with the soft “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-click” of the mechanical sprayer.
This calls for a drink, I thought. And thus began my afternoon ritual of a gin-and-tonic on the porch began, ironically at the suggestion of my Mormon neighbor.
While walking through the dining room to the kitchen, I noticed a scrap of wallpaper fluttering in the draft coming from the swamp cooler suspended in the window. I fingered the flap, and noticed that several layers of paper were covering the walls. I looked down at the deeply stained wood floor and wondered what the house may have looked like in 1890, when it was built. By the time I’d found the bottles of Tanqueray and Schweppes, sliced a lime, and plopped several ice cubes into the mixture, I had a vision for what I could do while Cheryl spent her summer days in clinical rotation at Hill Air Force Base.