The Back Yard

The Back Yard(Phil Penne) I’m in the back yard. I’m five years old.

It is a wondrous place filled with big green dinosaurs and swaggering pirates and cowboys with gleaming six guns. There are pine trees that touch the sky and a ditch teeming with black tadpoles and a swing set with a broken glider and only one swing. I have shootouts with imaginary scoundrels and pilot countless paper airplanes to the moon and back. I then lie on my back in the fragrant grass and watch vaporous galleons sail by on a cerulean sea.

I’m in the back yard. I’m sixteen years old.

I slam an aging mower through knee deep grass I have found every excuse not to cut. I drip adolescent sweat and curse the day my parents inflicted the unfairness of the world upon me. I plot my revenge for being saddled with such a chore, adding yet another detail to the deed with every leering friend who happens by. Unlike their literary predecessor, however, these Ben Rogers’ are too savvy to be conned into whitewashing this fence.

I’m in the back yard. I’m thirty-seven years old.

I daddy around with my young sons, growling and making monster faces and claw hands. I then obligingly die in the grandest tradition of Forties Hollywood when they pelt me with clumps of newly mown grass. They shriek with laughter and shout “do it again” until Mommy calls us in for Popsicles.

I’m in the back yard. I’m fifty-eight years of age.

I rest on a stained plastic lawn chair that sits in the lone shady spot of the back porch. I sip ice water fowled with miniature flotsam and listen to the lawnmower’s random clicking as it cools down. I wipe my brow, sigh wistfully and scan the back yard, hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of just one big green dinosaur.