a deal with god

I was mowing the grass, as usual.  It was Saturday, granted it was a bit late since I usually did it on Fridays but considering how little rain there was I figured it wasn't going to hurt anything.

I just never took into account the pool effect, and how the evaporation from it made everything in the back yard grow.  Like weeds.  Not that we had weeds, but...you get the point.  The back, in regards to the front, was always green.

My sister, who did the grass from time to time, did these patterns.  Eh.  I was a good 1950's guy, straight rows, only deviate when you have to and adapt them into the row.  This was the neighborhood standard.

The back yard was always the worst.  Inside the pool area, because of the fence around it.  The small area before you reached the fence around the pool (also enclosed by a fence).  The deck that separated the small area before the pool fence but also sided a part of the fenced side of the pool.  And finally, the true, small back yard.  A peach tree in the middle, sloping down to the fenced in garden.

And it was after all that, I finally quit the mower.  I looked up and while my parents had apparently decided to have a party with their friends, I saw my dad coming down to see me.

I was leaning on one of the gate posts, pretty much not giving a crap about anything.  He stood aside the adjoining gate post, and just started talking.

*

For a few moments, time that I tend to think that my brother and sister never, ever had, I had a brief glimpse into who my dad was, where he came from, and what made him the person that I strive to be.  It wasn't some exotic story, it wasn't a hardscrabble life...it was him telling me about his own father.  He died when my dad was 16.

*

My dad talked about the vegetable garden, the multiple fruit trees that were planted.  I was picturing the back lot of my grandmother's place, where it was nothing but grass, and years before she requested having the huge tree between her house and the garage taken down.  And there were no trees, finally, on her property.  But my dad told me about how it wasn't always like that.

And I like to think that my uncle and my dad used to walk with their father, back in the early '50s, through the quarter acre that they had, picking tomatoes and peppers and maybe the random fruit that may have finally sprouted.

*

He stopped kind of abruptly, but considering the number of people that we had not only in the house but also around the pool, it was understandable.  I put the mower back in the shed, he went back to attending to the guests, and I.

I went away with a sense of loss. I had a feeling that this was probably the only time I would ever really know my father.