Lawn Lady

About Lawn Lady

Late in a Booneville afternoon the light goes gold across the Prentiss County courthouse square, and the lawns on the side streets start throwing long shadows. Lawn Lady is at work in that hour — cutting, trimming around fence posts and mailboxes, edging the sidewalk until the concrete shows its own true line. Midsummer in northeast Mississippi asks a great deal of a yard: heat that sits perfectly still, then a week of rain that sends everything up at once. The answer is simply coming back, and coming back again, so no lawn ever gets away from the people who live there. A clean cut at dusk, the smell of it drifting, the walk swept bare — that is the entire point of the day. Yards are tended in Booneville and out through Marietta, New Site, Blackland and Wheeler.