Hannah Prompt One

Lawn

In the grass, scores of new chipmunks leap and twist in their little jackets of flesh. I remember coming back from the ocean, or a lake, and seeing our lawn again as it really is: how small, how managed, how hemmed in by the neighbors’ fences and the side of our garage and the azalea bushes it is. We can hear dogs we have never met barking in nearby houses, the slamming of doors, other people’s phones ringing, a tumble of voices. I know all of these things, but I also, mysteriously, know a parallel sense of its infinite space.

One summer, my brother and I woke up early every morning to look in the Have-A-Heart trap our parents had set under the azaleas. There were frantic squirrels. A raccoon, once or twice. Two baby possums who had bloodied their snouts struggling against the wire cage. In the end, we never did catch the woodchuck. (Canny, grizzled, and placid, he never moved more than was necessary and, with his small black hands and his formidable incisors, meticulously demolished what vegetable matter there was surrounding him. He was never startled, but when disturbed, raised himself on his hind legs with slow deliberate gravity and looked at you fixedly until you took a single step too close, and then he ran).

In the spring, curled ferns march over their brick-bordered plantings and into the tangled grass. I dreamed once than in the little alley of overgrown cedars in the back, you could find a path of beaten earth that led all the way to the lip of a canyon overlooking, out a long way off, other houses, a sort of distant village I had never seen before, that certainly had never been there before.

It’s late afternoon. High above in the hazy distance, troops of clouds mass in portentous billows. I’m on the lawn, flat on my back, staring up at the sky and trying to feel buoyed by the shadow I know I’ve trapped beneath me. What I really feel is the way the heat flattens everything, drawing together the ground and the white sky, so that existence becomes merely schematic, two dimensional. But lawn and sky are drawn apart again by the bulk of faraway thunderheads piling up like pale nebulae.

It’s this vertiginous double movement that I can’t quite explain: the way the opening of this distance thrusts earth and sky apart even as the heat collapses the one into the other; and how what emerges is the dreamy impression that I may be falling or floating—and the neighbors, too, may be floating, each sprawled on their own green handkerchief-square lawn—across a blank void, a white hole composed only of vast distance and heat.