The first night under sixty comes on a Wednesday, and by Saturday afternoon the man is at the Home Depot rental desk, signing for a core aerator.
The kid behind the desk walks him out to the dock, where the aerator squats on its wheels: a Honda engine bolted over a drum of hollow steel tines, heavier than anything that size has a right to be.
“Want me to call somebody up to help you load it?”
“I’ll manage.”
He manages. He tips the machine back, walks its front wheels onto a flatbed cart, then squats and heaves the rear end up after them, one corner at a time. In the parking lot he does it again, cart to bumper, bumper to cargo floor, into his wife’s red RAV4, where he has already folded the rear seats flat. It takes ten minutes and one word he would not say in front of his mother.
At home he stands at the back fence while the engine ticks itself cool in the driveway. The yard is half weeds and a quarter bare red clay, and the rest belongs to bermudagrass, which came under the fence from the neighbor’s side three summers ago and has been laying runners across the clay ever since, wiry and jointed, like speaker cable. In July the bermuda wins every fight. Now, with the nights cooling and the bermuda slowing toward its winter sleep, fescue has a chance, if the seed goes in while the window is open. The forecast agrees.
Getting the aerator out of the car is the problem he has been turning over since the parking lot. He solves it with two planks left over from the raised beds he built in the spring, their tops resting on the bumper and their feet chocked with iron plates borrowed from the barbell in the garage. He walks the machine down slowly, leaning back against its weight, the planks bowing and holding. When all four wheels touch concrete he stands in the driveway with his hands on his hips, pleased with himself, his back intact.
The engine catches on the second pull. He squeezes the bail, the drum engages, and the machine lurches off across the yard with him attached, tines punching into the clay and dropping fat red plugs behind it. Twice they snag a bermuda runner and tear up a yard of it, which he enjoys nearly as much as the ramp. He works in lanes, overlapping each by a wheel, until the whole yard looks as if a flock of geese has passed through.
The Scotts spreader has a dial on the handle, marked in half steps, and the back of the seed bag says to set it to 8.5. Eight and a half of what, the bag does not say. Somebody in Marysville, Ohio, chose the number, and the man, finding he has no better one, turns the dial until the arrow sits on it and pours in the seed. Each seed is a sliver the length of a grain of rice, coated in a dusty green shell of fertilizer.
When he pushes, a spinning plate under the hopper flings seed out ahead of him in a wide arc. It patters on the dry leaves along the fence and ticks against the siding when he turns too close to the house. It bounces off the bermuda mats. It rolls into the aeration holes and vanishes. He goes over the yard once north to south and again east to west, the arcs crossing, until the clay has a faint green freckle to it.
Halfway through the second pass he notices the vortex. The agitator at the bottom of the hopper has set the whole load turning, a shallow funnel with a dimple at its center, the outer grains circling and then sliding inward and down. He has slowed his walk to watch it, and has to pick up his pace again before the spread goes thin.
When the hopper runs dry he goes to the garage for the backup bag and brings a handful to the patch by the raised beds, where the sun is brightest. He kneels. He pulls off his right glove with his teethvand drops the seeds into the holes three and four at a time, pressing each rim closed with his bare thumb. The clay is cool and slick and keeps the print.
He wakes to the buzzing of the smart watch alarm, while it is still full dark outside, and gets out of bed. He finds his sandals by feel, lets himself out the side door, and walks around the house through grass heavy with dew to the spigot, where a brass splitter holds two hoses. He flips the lever for the backyard line. The hose stiffens along its length as it fills. Out back, the sprinkler coughs and settles, and he goes inside before it has made a single pass.
In the dark, the sprinkler sweeps its fan of water across the yard, pauses, and sweeps back: over the bermuda, over the red plugs of clay, over the thumbprints by the back steps, over thousands of green specks that have already, in the wet and the dark, begun to swell.