A Thing of Beauty

This is a story i found about a man mowing his grass and remembering the past as his kids were growing up .


“I need to mow the yard. Look at all of those yellow flowers growing in it,” I told Vicki. Hearing my words, my four-year old granddaughter, Kylie pleaded,” No, no, no, Pop-Pop, please don’t mow down the flowers. They are so beautiful!” I told her she could pick some for herself, but the rest had to go.

I fired up my riding mower, got on and began mowing. I looked at the flowers and they were kind of pretty, all yellow with a pink buttercup growing here and there. “It’s funny,” I thought, “these flowers are a nuisance to me, but to Kylie they are beautiful. I guess it is just how you look at things.”

Kylie’s view of things got me looking around our place. Our house is still nice enough, I guess, but like me, is beginning to show signs of age. It certainly doesn’t compare to some of the houses I saw over in Rockwall the other day. You talk about some nice places, they had them over there. There was every design imaginable; big rambling two-story houses with multi-stone exteriors, upstairs balconies and right on the lake. Sweet.

As I continued mowing, I recalled when we got this house. Wasn’t it right over there by that tree Vicki and I stood admiring the brand new house we had just purchased? We were so proud, but I think each of us was secretly concerned about paying for it. Oh, there’s the rose bush I planted. It was right about that spot my daughter, Stefani, practiced her cheerleader routines when she made the Jr. High squad. I can still hear her saying, “Watch this, daddy! DADDY! Watch me!”

Right there beside the house is where Stefani and Sandra Sumrow played in the mud before the yard had a blade of grass in it. They were supposed to just wade around in it, but before long, they were covered from head to toe in blackland mud. They were down and dirty, but happy. That is until I almost froze them when I rinsed them off with cold water from the hose before I would let them even go in the garage.

I mow along until I am under the hackberry trees in front of the house and as I look up I see one board nailed to a limb. It is the last remnant of a tree house my son, Jeff, and our neighbor girl, Amber Saye, constructed when they were around nine or ten years old. They were so proud, you would have thought they had built the Taj Mahal. They never knew it, but later I climbed up and put a few more nails in it to make it safer and stronger. I should remove that board, but for some reason never have.

As I move around back, I see the basketball goal that Jeff and his friends, Jess Lanier, Brandon Gilliam, Grant Day, Joey Rhoden and Todd Eudy spent countless hours shooting baskets and good-naturedly trash-talking each other. The backboard is getting rough and the goal doesn’t even have a net. I’ve wanted to take it down, but I’m glad I didn’t. My son came in from California for Mother’s Day and he and my grandson, Austin, played a little one-on-one on that same old goal.

I look down in the pasture and see the little pond where Austin caught his first fish. I have a picture of him proudly holding up the four- inch perch for all the world to see. Right next door is the Whitworth’s pasture where every day I used to take my granddaughter, Katelyn, to see their white baby donkey. I could never convince her it wasn’t a goat. Each day as soon as she got here, she would ask me to take her to “see the goat.” I finally gave up trying to change her mind and nicknamed the donkey, “Billy.”

I finish mowing and begin weed-eating around the old swing set that has survived all three of my grandchildren. I need to haul it off, but haven’t got around to it. I’ll probably get rid of it next year or maybe the year after that. No more than three years for sure. Hey, there’s the sandbox I built for Kylie. Not the best sandbox in the world, but it serves the purpose. It was just the other day Kylie caught a butterfly that lit on it. She held it a minute and then let it go free to “find its Mommy.”

Finally, I finish with the yard work and stand back to check out my handiwork. As I stand there looking around, I realize this house may not have all the amenities of the houses in Rockwall, but it does have something they don’t. It has memories. My memories. Our memories. And that makes it beautiful, especially with that patch of yellow flowers I left standing just for Kylie.