Tending to Grass, and to Grief, on a Tennis Court in Iowa

Mark Kuhn is hunched over, one knee on the ground, pulling dandelions from an otherwise immaculate lawn. With a small, serrated blade, he carefully carves tiny leaves from the turf, extracting as much of their roots as he can reach, and places them in a plastic container beside him. Dandelions, I learn, are as prolific as they are stubborn.

Three days earlier and some 4,000 miles away in my native England, Novak Djokovic had once again held the Wimbledon trophy aloft on the most revered court in all of tennis. Meanwhile, I was driving the 1,926 miles from my adopted home of Oakland, Calif., to be here, on this tennis court, on a farm in Northern Iowa, standing next to Mark and his weed-filled ice cream tub.

I kick off my shoes and stand barefoot like a child, taking in the Midwestern summer. The grass on the soles of my feet is warm and welcoming, and the morning sun undulates on the corrugated metal of the Kuhn family’s sheds and silos. I feel like I’ve been here before.

My memories of early childhood are mostly vague: a muted palette of inconsistency and confusion, lacking defined edges or chronology. But recollections of summers, which were spent in rural Cambridgeshire with my grandparents, are bathed in the palomino gold of the August sun on fields as far as the eye could see, and in the warmth of the love I felt there. Every afternoon, a curtain of decapitated dandelion-seed fluff, churned up by nearby combine harvesters, would fill the lattice patio window, on its way to offering seemingly infinite new beginnings.

It was here I discovered tennis — albeit watching, not playing. I was a resolutely unathletic child, one of my more enduring traits. In 1997, most British households had only five television channels, two of which ran wall-to-wall Wimbledon coverage for two full weeks, every year. I would normally have been at school in late June, but it was clear to one of my more perceptive teachers — who knew that I’d struggled in recent years with my grandfather’s sudden death, and with my father’s decision to leave to start a new family — that I was deeply unhappy at home and would be better off beginning my summer break early.

From the comfort and loving safety of Nan’s sofa, I quickly became invested in the progress of Tim Henman, who made it to the quarterfinals. At first, it was because there was simply nothing else on TV, and the whiff of British success at Wimbledon tends to send my country into an inexplicably contagious fever….