he is the third child. his sister and brother have already learned what he will learn---wariness. when the first boy was an infant, his mother turned the gas line on, turned the pilot light off, and sat down with her baby to die in the kitchen. a neighbor stopped in, interrupting her plan, and mama went off to spend a few weeks or months in the mental hospital. now, with three children, she has settled into a simpler pattern of verbally, mentally, and physically abusing them. beatings occur almost daily, for any infraction or for no reason. he learns that he is not good. he learns that punishment is predictable, but that the reasons for it are not. he learns fear and anxiety.

he treasures just one memory of a time when his mother smiled at him. he was a toddler. he would spend years of childhood trying to elicit another smile, trying to figure out what magical thing he had done to win a moment of approval. he will endure the frequent beatings without any context of what he could have done differently.

people smile when they see him leaving the store with his mother, because he looks up at her and asks. "was i good? mama, i was good, wasn’t i?" he was, and she knows it, and they both pretty much know that it won’t save him.

the older brother is in high school. he’s working already, saving his money to get out of the house. he refuses to help his mother beat the little boy one day, which infuriates her. it is not his job to help her abuse his little brother. but he doesn’t try to stop her, either. the sister keeps to herself, stays in her room. sometimes, just for her own amusement, she will say that her little brother has done something wrong, just to see him get punished. it may be the only power she has. the father is often away for his job, but when he is home, he is no help. no intervention comes from him.

in elementary school he is a good kid. bright, funny, active, but not naughty. his teachers like him. he has a crush on the girl with long braids. he makes himself a superman cape and tries to fly. he has learned not to say anything about what he wants or likes, because it will surely be taken away from him.

this week, he is terribly hungry, because mama has denied him anything but some bread and water. she sent him outside and told him to collect every stone from the wooded area behind the house, or he would get no food at all. there are a lot of stones. no one could possibly find them all. his father comes home from work one day and takes his son to run an errand in town. on the way home, they stop for a burger. the father watches as his son eats every crumb swiftly, silently, desperately. he orders another burger and sees this one disappear just as fast. a few questions make it plain that this isn’t just the hunger of a rapidly growing boy.

he grows accustomed to hiding his hurts. he mops his own blood off the floor after she beats him so his mother will not be further displeased and his father will not have anything too obvious to ignore.

eight or nine years of living like this. eight or nine years of having the sky fall on his head nearly every day. his parents have separated. the beatings are so bad now that he is afraid she will kill him. one day, he refuses to cooperate in his own punishment. then she really does just about kill him, and they are running through the house. caught in a room, he fights back for the first time. he is fighting his own mother for his life. more blood on the floor.

and then, one day, while visiting his father, there is a phone call. his mother was found dead in their house. she has killed herself. at the funeral, and afterwards, well-meaning family and neighbors keep telling him that he must "let it out". they interpret his lack of tears as the shocked grief of a bereaved child. but inside, he feels a strange relief. he feels free. placed with an aunt who took him in for charity, he is calm. he does not mind her lack of affection. he goes to school, does his chores, gets a paper delivery route. the pattern of his life is set: he will go to school and go to work for years to come, and he will not complain, and somewhere in the secret places of his heart and mind that he kept safe, he will try to figure out who he is and why he is here on the earth. he will, despite it all, grow into a good man.

as an adult, he tells me these things quietly. water under the bridge, he says. i am amazed that he was able to be a good man, a good husband, a good father. it breaks my heart to think of him as a baby, as a child, looking for the simple nurturing affection that should be every child’s birthright, and never finding it.

spring is officially in full swing when you have to resume mowing the lawn. (and when your car changes color from the pollen...) i rather detest mowing. it's dusty, noisy, and tiring. at this time of year, it's not so bad, but later on, when it's hot, it just about kills me. when i am finished mowing in the summer, i am so knackered by the end of the job that i can barely coil up the 40,000 feet of extension cord that my little electric push-mower requires. i stumble indoors, shedding things as i go; nasty grassy shoes at the garage door, shorts and shirt just inside in the laundry room. generally i gulp down several pints of water before dragging myself upstairs to the bath in my underwear, which is so sweat-drenched that i'd rather just throw it away instead of washing it. my face, should i glance in the mirror, is a strange shade that only sickly heat-struck caucasians can produce---simultaneously pink and grey. i don't look well, i don't feel well, i'm utterly exhausted. but the first couple of mowings in the spring and the last couple in autumn aren't nearly that bad.

still, as i was struggling with the mower this afternoon, i was having one of those cranky mental dialogues that overtake me when i am stuck with a task i don't like. it crossed my mind that the whole idea of having grassy yards around houses is something that ought to be deep-sixed, at least for modern middle-class households without a gardener. and probably the concept of a lawn, like so many other outdoor things, works much better in europe than it does here. better climate, less vicious vegetation, fewer fecking bugs!

so why do americans seem so wedded to their grass plots? they are a right pain in the ass. they require ridiculous amounts of water to get established and to maintain through the dry, hot middle of summer. i bet we've all got a neighbor who waters their lawn even when there is a period of water restriction in effect, like the selfish bastards that they are. the grass types are frequently ill-selected for the area in which they are grown. (ever seen those telltale spreading brown patches of zoyshia grass like cancers creeping through more indigenous grass? that stuff was a bad idea; never meant to be planted above the southern states...) lawns are even more intensively treated with chemicals than agricultural fields, and no matter what the lawn service guy says, those chemicals are vile. as in "don't let your kids or pets out on the grass for x amount of hours" whenever the lawn has been sprayed. and finally, do we really enjoy the hours of misery associated with maintaining these unnatural patches of virulent green monoculture grass? not to mention, wouldn't you love to sleep in on saturday mornings without being awakened by the growling and whining of people's mowers and string-trimmers?

i grew up in a rural area. we had a big lawn that was separated from the surrounding farm fields only by our driveway. it was a typical rural lawn, by which i mean it was a mixture of grass and weeds, with a strong emphasis on the weed part. this is how all yards used to look, whether they belonged to a redneck or a country squire type. it was all more or less green, and it was mowed regularly but not shaved, and it never, ever received one iota of fertilizer, pesticide, or any chemical whatsoever. it got no water beyond what the clouds naturally bestowed upon it. it was not de-thatched, leaf-raked, overseeded, limed, or cosseted in any way. and guess what? it grew just fine. i am realizing that the whole mindset about lawns has changed, at least in the suburban area in which i now live. these people don't say "mow the lawn"; they say "cut the grass". and they mean grass, because that's all they will permit to grow in their yards. they detest dandelions. they abhor clover. they deplore plantain and despise buttercups. ground ivy and wild strawberries make them grind their teeth. the very idea that something should flower in the midst of the grass offends them. they pour money, time, water, (and chemicals) into the ongoing effort to eradicate every other growing thing and keep that expanse of poison green flawless. yet i hardly ever see them in their yards. no mums with babies on picnic rugs in the sun. no toddlers playing with cups and pitchers of water or toys or big sparkly balls. no teens lounging and reading with the ipod on. no family dinners outside, no morning coffee or evening cocktail on the porch, no game of croquet or bocce on all that smooth-shaven green stuff. so what good is it? couldn't they just as well have a yard full of nettles or cactus, for all the use they make of it?

actually, there is a bit of a movement afoot to "kill the lawn", but it's very much in its infancy. outside of areas with chronic water shortage, such as arizona, the big toxic lawn reigns supreme still. but there are a few brave people who are reducing the size of their lawns, replacing some of the grass with expanded flower and shrub beds, or regionally suitable plantings of native species. some are letting whole sections of large yards revert to meadow during the growing season, and broadcast-seeding them with wildflowers. sounds fine to me, but i doubt whether my immediate neighbors would comprehend it very well. my lawn looks distinctly untended compared to the ones on either side. i regularly get little brochures from lawn care agencies stuck in my door...and yes, even i can admit that the little patch of front lawn looks ragged. but it looks that way because the soil was compacted during the house building process and because the lousy typical lawn care practices have favored the survival of the toughest weeds over the prima donna grass that was planted there. i expect that with a little benign neglect and patience it will improve. the clover that offends the neighbors is doing its part to improve the crappy soil, as are the taproots of the dandelions and the happy little earthworms that live in it because it hasn't been dosed with poisonous substances lately. i mow the leaves in autumn and leave the bits to compost into the lawn instead of bagging them up and having them hauled away. the back yard looks fairly decent, as the soil there was less destroyed. it's quite lush, with nice grass sprinkled with lovely little flowers from the buttercups and wild strawberry and clover. i understand the appeal of the velvety green expanse of a freshly-cut lawn, but for me it's enhanced by the flowers and things intermingled with the grass. and they help distract me from the boring misery of pushing a mower around the lawn every couple of weeks.

so i don't aspire to having the perfect swath of grass around my house. for reasons both economical and environmental, as well as sheer laziness, i have decided to confine my lawn maintenance to occasional mowing. my house doesn't look like versailles, so it doesn't require formal landscape perfection. although i wouldn't mind having just one gardener to do the boring mowing while i lounge like marie antionette...