Tommy Denton

Recent columns

• Gifts for sharpening rhetorical swords
• Bush is feeding China's worst instincts
• Heroism in the face of stupidity, and worse
• Treating oil addiction with a dose of harm

• Column archive

In the spring, as Tennyson wrote, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Come Wednesday, the vernal equinox, those turns of fancy can begin officially for all those young men so inclined, but those of us who've been blessed with numerous excursions through previous springtimes tend to entertain more pedestrian concerns as well.

Those bare patches of naked dirt in front and back yards for now occupy a good deal of my attention, creating no small amount of apprehension at the resistance of those barren patches to yield thick, waving expanses of new lawn.

Bold robins and mockingbirds attend to their appetites, undeterred by the fluttering ribbons of red and blue dangling from bright, yellow-green nylon twine stretched along the perimeters of each patch of ground. While the birds select their entrées, my squinting eyes search in exasperation for the signs of emerging life.

Each day, I spray water from the hose across the dirt in an act of faith that the reluctant seeds will eventually submit to the natural imperative of water, soil, sunshine and the stimulus of ultrasonic waves of impatience emitted by the guy with the hose.

This has been a hopeful foray into assisting our little section of the natural order, no doubt resented by a yard with a fiercely independent streak and, just for spite, inclined to cultivate a diverse array of pesticide-resistant, renegade plant species.

On those two strips of bare ground once grew a voracious crop of English ivy, which a crew of resolute landscapers attacked last November and left in its place freshly tilled topsoil. Springtime was supposed to provide a kinder, gentler bed of soft fescue lawn that would spread ever so agreeably where mutant vines once raged maliciously.

In all our years of trying to achieve what the marketeers have characterized as the joy of home ownership, we've managed to achieve only a grudging smudge of green on an otherwise brown thumb. Most of the motivation, since we've never really harbored love of agronomy and other things biospiritual, was our haphazard attempt to support our property value.

Eclectic grass blends and diverse plant strains of suspect origins have always posed challenges in the several yards we've kept, but we've discovered that frequent passes with a mulching lawnmower contributes to a sort of democratization of lawns: Keep 'em cut regularly and fairly uniformly, and even the ugly stuff that tends to get the upper hand blends in with the lawn.

Rather than pursue the joys of home ownership, we decided some time ago to lower our sights and go instead for skeptical amusement. Our current yard, however, provides occasional cause to believe that at the current slow state of progress, we may have to settle for an ironic smirk at what increasingly seems to be the utter futility of our misplaced ambitions.

With last week's plunge in the stock market based on a surge of foreclosures on certain home mortgages, prospects continue to loom for what economists call a "correction" in housing market valuations. For those with modest financial assets, euphemisms for "falling through the floor" offer small consolation when their home is their primary repository of financial well-being.

Nor do such downward market fluctuations generate much enthusiasm for getting out to perk up the landscaping in hopes of boosting the property's value.

Staring at those damp, barren brown spots every day leaves a forlorn yearning that at least some amusement may emerge to temper the skepticism inspired by the still, silent refusal of the grass seed to germinate and become lawn-like.

So young men's fancy in spring can turn to thoughts of love, or probably more accurately the primal manifestations of that inclination, but other elements in the natural order also await certain seasonal satisfactions.

Those of us who have ventured through dozens of springs and autumns still remember and understand something of vital urgings. We nurture them still, though not so much in those youthful sentiments resembling quick-spent tulip petals as in confident commitments that call to mind the thick, deep-rooted grandeur of an aging oak.

As much as I love towering oaks and reflections on primordial longings, though, I'm concentrating this spring on the splendor of the grass.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.