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Exercise 2: Describing a Place

The grass was always dead, perhaps more than dead, a crisp, yellow straw-like texture, that smelled dusty and dry. Frogs and snakes were always to be found in the swimming pool, and more than one dead rat met its untimely end at the bottom. Our back yard, or rather The Back of the Land, as we called it, was an open expanse of thick, soft dirt, spotted with fruit trees. There was one expanse of dirt without any trees, which was our particular place to play. We would trace out the boundaries for Capture the Flag and spend our days tromping through the dirt. In the spring, we would collect the fruit ripening on the trees and eat all we could before the rest was dried out or juiced for Popsicles. The fruit would ripen and sometimes drop before we could collect it. The fallen fruit, often gashed open from the drop, was left to rot at the base of the tree, gnats buzzing around the wounds.

During the day, the sun beat down indiscriminately on anyone that dared to venture outdoors. The air had an aftertaste of smoke, a result of the neighbor’s company of diesel trucks. The hot, dry air would blast in your face if you opened the front door. It was a dry, crackling heat, which seemed to preclude much movement. We seldom went farther than the swimming pool, though on more temperate days we would clamber up the hill. The inverse of the swimming pool, the direct result of the displaced earth required to empty out a space for it, the hill rose ten feet and ran the length of half the house. It was more often than not that an excursion on the hill ended in a skinned knee or a tumble through the dirt.

The side yard, the official yard, was fenced in with chain link on three sides (the house forming the fourth wall). That was the domain of the pets. For the most part, Snoopy patrolled the area, entertaining himself with races against the neighbor’s dog or by barking himself into a frenzy at a passing cat. The rabbits, Twinkle and Dixie, were rarely to be seen. We left them food, but it seemed that they had long since taken to foraging for themselves as the food dishes never seemed to empty. The trampoline was on the side yard, so we went there to use it, and also to lay on our backs on clear nights and watch for shooting stars in the wide, black sky. The sky would stretch on and on and up and up. I would strain my eyes to see the cloudy belt of nebula across the blackness that marked out the Milky Way. There weren’t any streetlights, that far in the country, and the darkness wrapped up everything in a massive dampness that was comforting in the face of all that everything.