Being a Dad Means Respecting the Yard

Part of how I think about myself as a dad is how I take care of other people, but it’s also in how I care for the living world around me.

This is Love, Dad, a column by Kristen Arnett about Dad Culture, queerness, and taking care of the people we love.

I am an unabashed lover of backyards.

Getting in some good yard work on a weekend afternoon and then sitting down in that neatly ordered backyard, sipping from a sweaty can of beer, has always been one of my favorite activities.

Part of that love has to do with the fact that I grew up outside. My brother and I were often foisted from the house by our mother during the summer, and when it’s hot in Florida, you learn how to entertain yourself or else sweat to death in abject misery. All this to say: We found things to do.

Being in a backyard means discovering the smaller, more intimate parts of your world. There are the plants, sure, but there are also the birds and bugs and furred creatures that live inside that greenery. Discoveries could be painful—wasp stings or fire ant bites or even unknowingly tromping through a bed of nettles—but they could also be awe-inspiring: Holding still long enough to allow a hummingbird to hover near your face, sipping delicately from a broken bloom. Pill bugs tucked into palms, unfurling and rolling, the armadillos of the insect world. Squirrels poised midleap on a moss-laden oak branch, cheeks full of pilfered fruit. All this encapsulated in the wild wreck of a backyard afternoon.

But the maintenance of a yard. That’s another thing entirely.

Growing up, I wasn’t asked to help with any of it. On Saturday afternoons, I was expected to clean. My sister and I had indoor duties. We scrubbed the bathroom and washed the dishes. We dusted the house and swept the terrazzo floors. There was vacuuming. There was laundry. My brother, however, was exempt from these chores—it was his job to help handle the lawn. “Handle” is the critical word here; lawns are managed, organized, subdued. While my sister and I swiped down kitchen counters, my brother was outside in his dirty clothes and yard shoes, helping mow the lawn in careful, precise stripes—“Overlapping,” my father would say, “they need to overlap so you don’t miss any grass”—while my father went around with the Weed Whacker and handled any creeping edges.

Living in Florida means that because of the heat and the rain, you need to mow your lawn at least once a week. Wait two weeks and your mower might short out in all the damp from the grass. So on Saturdays, while my sister and I buffed and shined and cleaned inside, they’d be out there, trying to hack the Florida out of the place.

As an adult in Florida, I’ve cared for many lawns. I’ve gotten up early on the weekend and yanked out the lawn mower and thrown on my dirtiest pair of sneakers. I’ve used the leaf blower to get rid of the dead oak leaves and twigs and hunks of Spanish moss that lined my back patio and driveway. I’ve also hacked away at a spiny bougainvillea with a pair of trimmers, avoiding the thorns as best I could but still coming away with quite a few slices. Part of navigating the backyard is the understanding that plants have defense mechanisms. Sometimes that means bloodshed.

Handling a yard is sweaty, tough business. It’s humid and sunburned and thankless. At the end of the day, what you’ve managed to accomplish doesn’t last longer than a week. There is something fascinating about that, I think—yard maintenance is inherently impermanent. Dads who maintain lawns are weekend warriors, brave souls coated in sweat and sprayed by dirt spit up from the back end of a mower. Your clothes are filthy and you stink. Hands calloused from piloting all those bucking, wild tools necessary for cultivation. You yank the pull cord on the mower and pray that the engine turns over. Carefully guide it along the scalloped edges of sod, hoping you got all the debris beforehand so the blades won’t shoot a piece of sharpened stick directly at your shin.

Handling a yard is sweaty, tough business. It’s humid and sunburned and thankless.

There are dozens of ant piles. Hordes of stinging insects zeroing in on the sunburned skin of your neck. All this at the end of a long afternoon and you’re just going to have to head back out and do it all again the following weekend. But there is something affirming about the exhaustion that comes from hacking a semblance of order into a yard. You treat yourself to an icy-cold beer afterward and survey the damage. You’ve fought hard and long, and you’ve fought well. There is a sense of dad-like satisfaction that comes from looking at the work you’ve done to maintain your household, even knowing those diminished weeds will creep back again after the next summer storm. To be a dad often means contending with nature so your family doesn’t have to. Dads are the first line of defense against an encroaching landscape. They are the barrier between wilderness and family.

But, wildness aside, lately I’ve been more interested in the tenderness of yard care. Part of this has to do with how I want to grow as a person. It’s easy enough to hack away at the vulnerable parts of myself, but it’s much harder to treat them with sweetness. I want to explore how being a dad has more to do with thoughtfulness than with severity. As a child, I watched my grandfather care for the flowers that my grandmother loved best. He was painstaking with the rose bushes. Thoughtfully trimmed the crepe myrtle in the winter months so it could grow fuller and lusher in the spring. He hung a swing for us from the branches on an enormous live oak, careful not to mar any part of the beloved tree in the process. He harvested fruit from the loquat out back and showed us how to snag our own without breaking any branches.

In much of Dad Culture, we’re sold the notion that dealing with nature requires battle; the yard is portrayed as a nemesis or a foe. But I like to think that with what we know about climate change and invasive species, in order to best execute living in the greenery, dealing with yards requires respect. Not the striking of a tool against the sod in order to break it, but rather offering a gentle hand that attempts to nourish it. Flowering plants and the flower beds are traditionally not in the father’s purview, unlike how we view cutting grass and weed whacking, but I’d like to reiterate that all these plants grow together in the yard. Everything twines up, tangled in the vinery. If we are protecting our homes by clearing the yard of debris and weeds, then doesn’t that act of protection mean we are effectively nurturing and caring for our homes as well?

Though I originally considered mowing as a Saturday chore that engaged my muscles and physical body, as I worked on my first novel, I began to view lawn mowing as a meditative process. As I dragged myself out of bed and lumbered outside to yank awake the engine, I let my mind wander. I walked back and forth, carefully lining up the tracks so I didn’t miss any spots, and thought about the shape of things other than the grass. It was hot, nasty work, but it was also contemplative. The shriek of children playing in a nearby yard, lizards scurrying to the safety of the trees, ants lazily circling the carcass of a slain beetle. I wondered about myself and my work and how I fit into the world around me. For many dads, lawn care essentially means alone time. It’s just you and the mower, moths battering your ankles as you trudge through piles of damp grass.

Over the past year, I moved from my lifelong home in Orlando to a new spot in Miami. The air is swampier here than it would be in Central Florida or the Panhandle or even near the gulf. The homes are Mediterranean in design instead of one-story stucco ranches. The plants are different too. When my girlfriend and I moved into our apartment, I knew she wanted us to collect some plants for our new home. I agreed; I wanted to live in a place that reflected the wildness of my childhood backyard. We joked that it would be a good time to go to Lowes, a very lesbian thing to do, but as soon as I got there, I found myself stunned by the variety on display. There were a bevy of plants to choose from: bromeliads and citrus trees and succulents. Tools to collect for the work, like gardening gloves, potting soil, and drainage trays. Though I love the outdoors, I assumed that my girlfriend would wind up caring for this new assortment of greenery. She’s always kept plants in pots. That’s not the way I’ve ever experienced vegetation. So much of the Central Florida yard experience is existing in the world that grows around you, despite the way you might try and hack it down.

But once we got those plants potted and set around our new place, I discovered a whole new understanding of care. Unlike the backyards I’d tangled with, opponents I’d battled, these plants required nurturing. They would not grow regardless of my treatment. I had to listen to them. What did they need from me? Water more, water less? More sun or partly shade? I spent weeks struggling to listen when previously so much of my time had been spent fighting. Part of how I think about myself as a dad is how I take care of other people, but it’s also in how I care for the living world around me. It requires patience. As a dad who moves through life impulsively, quite often making decisions based on gut instinct, it’s a continued struggle to remember that most things in life require time. The world wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the potted plant that struggles to find the right amount of sun and shade out on my patio. It doesn’t know what it’s doing yet, and, frankly, neither do I.

It’s entirely possible that the concept of what makes a “yard” needs its own careful pruning.

We’ve been taught that our yards have to look certain ways. They’re supposed to be manicured and neat. Trimmed into some semblance of order. Traditional sod lawns require lots of watering and aren’t great for the environment. Invasive plants are brought in because people like the way they look. They don’t consider the fact that sometimes those beautiful green things kill off the native plants, exterminating populations of bees and birds and butterflies and subsequently devastating entire species of flowers and trees. It’s entirely possible that the concept of what makes a “yard” needs its own careful pruning.

The grass will always grow back. The weeds will sprout. The dead tree limbs might need trimming. Plants have belonged in the yard long before we came along with the lawnmower to run them over. I can carve out a space for myself, but there is also room to be respectful of what a lawn needs in order to thrive. Allowing it to grow in the way that works best. To be a good dad, I need to treat it respectfully, not hack it away at the roots.

Not everyone has a lawn or even wants one. What constitutes caring for greenery can be as little as watering a potted succulent. It’s all in how you care for things.

We can grow together.

Love,

Dad

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Ask-a-Dad: LAWNS

Here are some questions you had for me about lawns and plant care!

What can I do to deter a fox (please, god, no urine-related strategies)?

Love that we are opening with a question that involves urine! From what I’ve been able to discover, if you don’t want to spray everything down with pee, there are some other options. One is to purchase a noise-making device, something with a frequency meant to deter specific animals. They range in price, from the twenty-buck variety to ones that run a couple hundred, so you’ve got options. There’s also the possibility of installing motion-sensor lights. Those are helpful for all sorts of midnight munchers, not just foxes. It’s probably also a good idea to block off any areas in the yard that they might consider worthy of turning into a den. There are sprays, but many of them do include chemicals that mimic urine. Maybe it’s less offensive if you buy them dry?

What is the gayest plant?

This is a great question. The gayest plant is any plant, because as we all know, care of the homosexual agenda, all plants are gay.

What’s the best plan of attack for a bush/tree that’s a liiiittle too tall for a short dyke? I’m trying to trim and shape but I can’t reach

You can always buy a short ladder or multistep stool. These are nice to have around the house, anyway, especially if you have storage areas that require a little extra height to access. Just fold it up and hide it in a closet when it’s not in use or chuck it under a bed or stash it beside the fridge. I also think it’s completely fine to just drag out a chair from your house. We’re not trying to break the bank, just trim some leaves!

How would you feel about a no-mow lawn, filled with native plants that didn’t require extra water or chemicals? I would love this, but my wife likes cutting the grass (which is mostly green weeds).

I am extremely into this idea. There are plenty of ways to have a lawn constructed of native plants that don’t require all the environmentally bad parts of grass care. I’d consider compromising with your wife and taking things slow. Converting a traditional lawn to a native one takes time anyway. Start by turning parts of it over to the encroaching greenery and keeping smaller plots of the lawn for your wife to mow. And I’m willing to bet by the time you’re ready to get rid of that patch of weeds, your wife will be happy to give it up. There’s a lot of tending you can still do with native plants; maybe she just wants to still have an excuse to spend time outside!

How do you keep the goddamn squirrels off of your bird feeders?

The eternal question! I’ll be completely honest with you: It’s extremely difficult to keep squirrels off a feeder. They are crafty and they never give up on a food source, no matter what. One of the ways I’ve found works best is to post a feeder away from any place a squirrel can jump. That means setting a feeder far away from trees and branches, windowsills, or any kind of vantage point. Keep in mind that they can leap very, very far. I bought a feeder that stabs into the ground, and that worked fairly well. It sat in the center of the yard, away from the oaks, and its stand was tall and made from slick aluminum that the squirrels couldn’t climb. It managed to keep them away, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then one night I watched a rat climb up the side and dump out the entire feeder. So maybe just go in with the understanding that nature finds a way. And that, my friend, is beautiful. Or at the very least makes for a funny story.