Four Years Ago Two Weeks from Now

Green and beige blades of grass are stiff under my footfalls. Their warm, rich scent fills my nose. Swathes of wild chamomile across the yard infuse the air with their sweetness. The essence fills my mouth so strongly that I involuntarily run my tongue around my teeth in search of its wonderful taste. 

The grass is short, and a bit dry, which means someone’s cut it, probably with the ride-on lawn mower. There are no clippings on the ground that I can see, which means the collection bag was used. I wonder where they put the clippings. 

Grandpa used to take the grass clippings and dump them in the pens. Since he was raising pheasants for Uncle Julio’s hunting club, he wanted them to look nice. “Some customers look and they say, ‘Where is de tail?’ and others they say, ‘What tail? I don’t care about de tail.’ So you don’t run around over there.” He pointed at the big semicircle of grass bounded by the road and the curving red gravel driveway. “You can run around everywhere else in the yard, but not there. I mow the grass there and I put it in the pens, and the birds pick at that and not each other.”

Now the pens are empty, and it doesn’t matter if we crush and muddy the grass encircled by the driveway. But I still don’t. 

There’s a fire burning in Uncle Julio’s Solo Stove. The heat of the flames will be welcome on my face and hands as the evening gets darker and cooler, but for now they’re more welcome as a visual reminder of Grandpa. I wonder how the fire was started. Probably not Grandpa’s way. 

“No, no, no!” he hollered, and my sister froze. 

“Not like that!” he told her, taking away the red gas can (which he had just instructed her to use).

“You don’t pour it on the fire from the can; you do that, the fire go up into the can, the whole can catch fire! Foosh!" He gestured wildly with one arm. "I show you how to do it safely. You put some on a piece of paper, and you throw that on the fire.” 

Safely use gasoline to start a fire. That was Grandpa all the way. The can is still here, sitting on the verge of the undergrowth under the trees, over by the bird barn. 

I hear a thwack, and turn to see a boy and his dad—I think he’s Mom’s cousin—tossing a frisbee back and forth a little ways up the hill. Beyond them is the woods, where a couple of falling-apart wooden shacks used to be. In there, the grass doesn’t get cut, and there used to be all sorts of junk lying out of sight. Maybe some of it is still there, maybe it isn’t, but I don’t dare find out. It would be nigh on disrespectful to Grandpa. 

We were playing hide-and-seek-tag. Five of us: four siblings and one cousin. The thick, towering old trees on the hill made excellent hiding spots, as well as obstacles to the tagger tagging us. 

In mid-chase, we heard Grandpa yelling, and we all froze. His words were unintelligible as he came hustling up the hill, but his tone was angry. We all looked at each other, wondering, What did we do now? 

“You don’t play in here,” Grandpa scolded. “I show you.” He marched away, reached into the tall grass, and pulled up an old board I hadn’t known was there at all. 

“Look! See!” He beckoned, waiting until all of us had hesitantly gathered round. 

Grandpa pointed at the long, rusty nail protruding from the weathered wood. “You step on this, it goes into your foot, it hurts!”

He threw the board down and swept his arm out at the tall grass. “All over, there are nails! You can’t see them. You play in the yard where I mow the grass, not in here.” 

“Sorry, Grandpa,” we mumbled, one after another.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he told us, then went back down the hill at a much slower pace, back to the pheasant barn, back to his unending work with the birds. He was always trying to find better ways to take care of them. 

One thing he was always tinkering with was the bird feed recipe. It was feed corn with grain pellets, but he was always changing the ratio of corn to grain. 

I helped him sometimes.

For a while it was three scoops of grain pellets to one scoop of corn. Another time it was two scoops of grain pellets to three scoops of corn. The mixture was always changing, but the tools to mix it were always the same: transparent plastic gallon pitchers, white plastic tarp bags, the giant grain pellet bags so big that I couldn’t hope to lift them on my own, and big plastic garbage cans full of corn. 

We would spend several hours standing in the sunshine on the warm green grass, my hands chalky with the dust from the corn and grain, sweat running down my back under my t-shirt. The ripe smell of feed would plume into my face with each scoop.

Once the white plastic tarp bags were fat and full, we twisted the tops closed and tied them with twine. Then Grandpa counted the bags as we heaved them, me on one end, him on the other, onto the little flat trailer hitched to the four wheeler.

He counted in English at first, but switched to Spanish at either ten or eleven. 

But I can’t remember which. 

Two weeks from now, it will be four years since Grandpa died. 

Four years since this house, this property, stopped being where he lived. 

Four years since I heard him say my name with his Mexican accent, pronouncing it a way no one else does. 

But in my mind, I can still feel the hot sun, and the sweat, and the chalky dust on my hands. I can still smell the summer grass, and the corn and grain, and Grandpa’s flannel shirt as he works next to me. I can still hear Grandpa’s voice saying my name. 

At least in memory, the past can become present.