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Village life: Like a smile of great sweetness

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Monday, November 29, 1999

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People cultivate cacti, aloe, portulaca, pansies and hibiscus in pots on their tiny porches and decks. Here and there is a nook just big enough for a thick-necked palm or a medusa - head of bougainvillaea. But no back yards.

One can develop a taste for it. If you can at least see and hear the clanking, ever varied harbor with its container ships, liners, tugboats, yachts, flags, cranes, bridges, foghorns and, of course, the sparkling sea stretching out beyond the breakwater " all that business you don't have to tend to but which goes on with or without you " you can actually relax and forget about your claustrophobia in your microscopic high-density piece of high-priced real estate.

The harbor - a big complicated front yard, hard-won and shared by everybody on the hill.

For back yards, you have to go to the Midwest.

I have a fine back yard in Flint. Midwesterners generally do — small or large, usually with a swathe of grass that we mow, one week diagonal, another straight across, another up and down. The night after you mow it, it smells fabulous. For most of the summer, there are fireflies courting in the fresh-cut blades. I'm thinking about how sweet that is.

Back yards offer solace and, an old-fashioned word, surcease.

One of my first memories is sitting in a galvanized iron tub in a back yard in Ohio, cooling off on a hot August day. Another is shelling peas with my mothe — on our laps, bowls of fat pods, fresh picked and still sun-hot from the garden. I remember how happy she was — peas right out of her own garden! We ate them that night.

I got married once in my back yard, the leafy triangle behind the 70-year-old house of my first domestic era. We piled up a feast on a long table, and we sat out there drinking champagne until 3 a.m. The next day two dozen plastic corks poked up from the grass like shuttlecocks.

I celebrated my second marriage in a back yard, too — new husband, new house, new back yard to seed with memories. After dinner al fresco, we put up a big screen and showed an outdoor movie of our California rites. We served drinks out of the garage and lit sparklers after dark.

Back yards can be theaters for revenge. A buddy of mine said when he got divorced the only thing he took was his Weber grill — totem of the back yard. And he uses it still, vindicated by every juicy bratwurst in his new, happier life.

Back yards are our own little nature preserves, where we exclaim over cardinals, yell at squirrels, equivocate over bunnies and try to get tomatoes to grow. Sometimes, they're graveyards too.

Our late cat Joey, a transplant from California who zestfully claimed our Flint back yard, is buried under the bird feeder where he loved to lurk. We had a funeral for him one summer evening after a game of croquet (another backyard must). After a few toasts, we took turns spooning his ashes into the cone of good Flint dirt we'd hollowed out for his feline eternity.

We like to own our back yards. In the city, of course, we put up fences, not out of hostility or fear like at the Mexican border or around the Green Zone, but, I contend out of respect for our neighbors and a deep-seated taste for privacy. I think we bound our back yards too because we revel in idiosyncrasy and we want that undisputed spot where we can be ourselves.

Not to get too high-falutin', but it just occurred to me that Midwestern yards reflect an itchy tension in our old U.S. of A. The front yard is sort of Hamiltonian, where we defer to the majority and keep up a respectable, potted-geranium face. The back yard is Jeffersonian, where we assert our personal liberty and, say, flaunt our taste in hostas or let the crabgrass go wild or put a terra cotta Buddha under the mulberry— or even hopefully throw out the occasional cannabis seed if we damn well please. Front yard, Apollo. Back yard, Dionysius.

So, my fellow Americans, there's something worth fighting for, if you ask me, the right to back yards.

The right to those earthy squares of liberty, where, on certain summer nights, you can lie down on a quilt and listen to the cicadas until, as James Agee once remembered, the night is "one blue dew," the stars, wide and alive, each "like a smile of great sweetness."

Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981, and prides herself on increasing crankiness. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel Night Blind is widely available.

You can find many other examples of her essays, fiction and poetry on our web site, www.eastvilllagemagazine.org, her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.html. She teaches writing at UM-Flint.

Patti Warner is a graphic artist who has lived and worked around Flint her entire life.

Her varied lines of greeting cards are sold through Tumble Dry Low Cards. Her cards are available throughout Genesee County at Pages Bookstore, Dale - Health Foods, Good Beans Cafe, Bauman - Running Center, UM-Flint Bookstore and in the Flint Farmers' Market at Edna - Spices and Herbs and East End Books and Music.

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