Ours Was the Largest Yard
By George Durnell
Ours was the largest yard on the street because my father had seen the chance to purchase an extra half lot before the land to west of us was subdivided. So it was just assumed that each year, the neighborhood Fourth of July picnic would be at our house. Everyone pitched in – the women planned the menu and devised the table decorations. The men were assigned to grill the hotdogs for the kids and steaks for the adults, and some of them acquired the cases of canned beer that would be kept cool in big tubs of ice.
But it was my father who really was at the heart of the whole party. In the June weekends, he worked in the yard to trim the shrubs and plant the flowers. Some years, he painted the porches and the back steps, and gave the old wooden Adirondack chairs and the metal tables a fresh coat of enamel. He dragged the Christmas lights from the attic and strung them from tree to fence to the corner of the house and back again – something that was considered quite Bohemian in those days of Eisenhower and Ed Sullivan. He talked to all the other families, arranging for the teenagers to bring their families' folding yard chairs and card tables early on the day of the Fourth, so all could be put in place by the time the picnic was to start.
Late in the afternoon, my father would disappear into the house to change into his official Fourth of July uniform: a red and white checked shirt and blue linen slacks. As the families arrived, he greeted them, offered the adults a beer and the kids an orange soda or a Coke. Soon, the fires were blazing in the portable grills, and the empty beer cans began to fill a large barrel someone had provided to serve a trash can.
One year, the men devised a game of pitching the cans into the barrel. There was some arcane scoring system, developed no doubt by my father, that I never really understood. But it became the neighborhood tradition to play that game every Fourth of July, and at no other time.
After the desserts of layer cakes and cherry pies and ice cream, my father and some of the other adults helped the kids light the sparklers that we carried in the fading summer light. Then, the music would start, and the kids were bundled off to bed to listen to the faint sounds of the adults crooning along with Bing Crosby or Perry Como. I could pick out my dad’s reedy tenor as I drifted off to sleep, wishing that there could be another picnic on the fifth or twenty-sixth of July, or any other summer evening.
The picnics occurred every year through 1958, when my father was transferred and we left the neighborhood. I heard later that everyone always talked about reviving the custom, but without my dad there, it never happened. Or perhaps the time for that kind of neighborly cohesiveness had just passed.
One new family once asked my father what he would do if it rained. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It won’t rain.” And it never did.
