I remember grass. Barely. As such, it wasn’t much, maybe a few hundred square feet, growing inside an oval edging made of brick in the middle of our backyard.
But oh, how the neighborhood kids loved it — the only patch of grass in the entire ’hood. There, they ran barefooted, did somersaults, played croquet.
We moved out of there in 1996 into a neighborhood that expressly forbade grass in anyone’s front yard. If some did plant it in their backyards, I have no idea. I suspect few, if any, did.
Save for Winterhaven and a few other neighborhoods that began when Ike was still in the White House, you’d be hard-pressed to find a lush, green lawn in this town today.
High water bills — and a growing consciousness that we are, after all, living in a desert — long ago made Tucson a water-stingy town. Out went the Bermuda grass and mulberry trees; in went drought-resistant plants and cacti.
Could an ocotillo ever grow in Beverly Hills? Doubt it. But thanks to California’s first mandatory water-use restrictions, many of those lush lawns may soon give way to lower-water-use landscaping or even — eek — gravel. And hey, why not — especially with the state offering thousands of dollars in rebates to homeowners who rip out their lawns.
No such offer was made to my dad back in the early ’50s, when he tended to the Bermuda grass planted front and rear of our house on Tucson’s south side. Irrigation came from a hose attached to a revolving yellow sprinkler that seemed to turn for hours on end during the summertime. In an era with few backyard pools, that sprinkler was a kid’s designated water feature.
During the early years, my dad cut the grass with a push mower. Later on, he used a mower powered by gas — and a string of curse words — to propel the thing. Wintertime, the grass went to dry thatch, which we invariably tracked into the house.
The first home my husband and I owned boasted a small patch of grass out front, made sparse and sickly due to the shade of a hovering chinaberry tree.
When we moved to the mining town of Silver Bell, water was free to the residents, and everyone seemed to own a lawn of water-sucking St. Augustine grass. That’s when we purchased an electric mower. No more cursing to get it started – though the mower didn’t have quite the same oomph while slicing through the dense grass.
Four years later, we bought a new house on a barren lot in Tucson and planted dozens of one-gallon mesquites in the front yard, quenched by drip irrigation — at least when the rabbits weren’t gnawing on it.
Eventually, we put in a pool in the backyard, along with the aforementioned oval of grass. One spring, my husband and I fertilized it with chicken manure, whose fine dust managed to coat just about every inch of our skin. It also burned the grass. Never, I repeat never, toss chicken manure on your grass, should you still have any.
Winter or summer, we always had grass in our backyard, thanks to the winter rye my husband planted every fall — fertilized with good old bovine manure.
Only the dog continued to enjoy the grass after the kids left home, though we kept up its maintenance till the day we moved out — the last time we’ve ever had a lawn.
A few years ago, I drove by my childhood home. Not a blade of grass out front, which had instead become a parking lot of sorts for the current occupant. Meanwhile, they still sell a semblance of our old yellow sprinkler online for $32.99. My dad would never believe it.
