I can see the front yard in as many ways as I have memories of it. It had a totally different aspect according to the season, weather, time of day and whatever I happened to be doing. The driveway took on a soft, sandy texture if I imagined it as Wrigley Field's warning track, or the spongy hardness of a tennis court, or the thick turf of the Soldier Field endzone, with yellow Wiffle bats stuck in the hedges as uprights. This made it unrecognizable as the same wet slab of pavement across which an aunt walked from her car for Sunday lunch through the kind of soaking rain that made the grass glow a deep, lush green.

The varying light and my mood even changed the contours of the lawn, smoothing it level after it was mowed in a perfect striped pattern, or allowing it to slope down toward the neighbors' yard and making our house appear to be up on a hill instead of at the bottom of one, as it was, while I lay on their prickly, over-fertilized grass. I can still feel the texture of our lawn in all its variety, from the thin, sparse strands, like an old man's hair, under the shade of the dogwood trees or on the hard-packed short slope on the other side of the hedge, to the thick clumps of sweet onion grass by the front walk.

One day as a young boy, fearful of bumblebees after one returned my stepping on it by stinging me between the toes, I tried to ward them off by cutting each clover stalk with a pair of scissors and taking away the white blooms that attracted them. But that was in the back yard, where instead of the neat arrangements out front for public consumption, wild profusions of asparagus and raspberry plants, dark secret spaces under the lilac bushes, and even a barely remembered pumpkin patch prompted my imagination in all its fantasies and fears. I could construct whole worlds there, and often did, cheered on by the power lines and the three towering silver maples, whose leaves rustled and rippled and flipped over to reveal their light underbellies when storms approached. The heavy air would be pushed aside with a few strong gusts, while fat raindrops began to fall, too real for me, and I would run up the hill to the house, leaving my things behind.