The sod came up in strips like old carpet, and the clay under it was the color of brick and about as willing.
Margo Teasley knelt at the edge of the cut and pushed the probe down six inches. She crumbled the plug between her thumb and finger before she let herself say anything about it. It came apart in flakes, dry the whole depth, forty years of mowing pressed into a layer a root would have to break instead of enter.
“Six weeks till planting,” she said to the yard. “Seven, with the cold snap coming.”
Two streets over the automated lawn coverage scorer ran its Tuesday loop, rotor pitched high and steady, and she listened to it work down Ardmore and turn. She had watched it pass her house two hundred times. She had never once been on the wrong side of it — until today.
The number arrived Wednesday morning in the template the association had used since the subdivision went up. GREEN COVER INDEX: 41. MINIMUM: 70. CURE PERIOD: 14 DAYS. Below that, the appendix reference. Below that, in smaller type, the plant list.
She had written the plant list. In 1998 she was the county extension agent for turf and ornamentals, and the developer’s lawyer called her office asking for something a homeowner could follow, and she gave him eleven species with their sowing rates and a note about fall establishment. The covenant kept the eleven species and dropped the note, including the two the piedmont summers had stopped supporting around 2029.
The instrument carried a soil-moisture channel. She knew it did, because she had sat in the meeting where the vendor demonstrated it. The report had no field for it.
Curtis Vann came down at four with the printout under his arm. He served on the committee because nobody else raised a hand, and he carried the document everywhere, tabbed in four colors, having learned early that quoting it went better than explaining it.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. “I drove past this morning. You’re doing it right.”
“I’m doing it the only way it works.” She set a plug on the tailgate for him. “Six inches down. Squeeze it.”
He did. It powdered.
“Okay.” He thumbed to the green tab. “Four point two is cover. Sustained living cover of no less than seventy percent, assessed weekly by the designated instrument. There’s a temporary condition variance in four point six. I’d sign it today. The language is a documented trend toward compliance, so I have to attach something that goes up.”
“Fescue germinates in fourteen days when the soil is warm. It isn’t warm.”
“Then I’d attach a number that goes down.” He closed the printout on his finger. “They’d deny it and the variance is spent. Margo, I’m the wrong thing to be angry at.”
“I know exactly what you are,” she said, and heard how it came out, and left it.
He went home. The plug sat on the tailgate through the evening and dried a shade lighter.
Thursday she crossed to the Bellamys’ yard, which had scored 94 in July and 91 in August and which nobody had watered since June. She knelt in it. The blades stood even and bright and gave under her palm like something alive. She pushed the probe down six inches, turned out the plug, and crumbled it. It held nothing. No structure, no moisture, no smell, a gray powder with green stitched across the top of it.
The instrument read what it could see from above, and from above there was color.
She sat back on her heels in the Bellamys’ beautiful dead grass and did the arithmetic she had been refusing since Wednesday. Annual ryegrass, dyed, broadcast heavy over the layer she had spent a day opening. Green in four days. Dead by July, and the clay worse than she found it, and legible as a lawn.
She bought nine bags in Matthews and spread them by hand that evening, walking the pattern she had taught at field days for twenty years, throwing seed she would have told anyone in the county not to buy.
The rotor came down Ardmore on Tuesday and turned.
Curtis called at eleven with seventy-eight. He had photographed the yard from the street already, and the association would attach the picture to the appendix as a documented successful remediation, under her name, on the page that carried the plant list.