A Four Shirt Morning

Ribbon Falls, Grand Canyon - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

If you have never laid sod on a Georgia summer morning, don’t. I do it for a living (that, and other unsavory, tiring things). Survival requires a plan and experienced help. I had both.We had cut and weed-whacked the fescue, and poisoned and weed whacked the Bermuda. Yesterday we delivered seventy, forty pound bags of good topsoil. At seven forty five this morning, I arrived and began prepositioning the bags so we could dump them and rake smooth the dirt. We were half way to being finished when the crew chief arrived and saw that we did it right.

Like Poor Blanche Dubois, we often depend on the kindness of strangers: in this case the truck driver who arrived at exactly the right time to offload two pallets of Zeon zoysia. We set to work after I changed out of my first shirt. It was not yet nine in the morning. The temperature headed toward the nineties with a dew point of seventy two.

I delivered sod while my workers practiced their artistry, trimming, tucking and going around sprinkler heads. At eleven thirty we finished one patch and had forty pieces left over. We started next week’s section of lawn and finished cleaning up at one in the afternoon. By then the three of us had consumed at least sixty ounces of fluid apiece. Mine went straight to my three t-shirts, which I wrung out and dried over the side of the truck.

They got their pay and went home. I worked for half an hour cleaning and emptying my truck. There was great satisfaction in a completed job. No one died, and I picked up the house next door for a zoysia lawn next month.