The details are hazy, but we know it was evening, a weekday, and that one of us had backed over our younger son’s bicycle that morning, ruining the training wheels. My wife says, still, that I did it. I’m less sure. Doesn’t matter. Here’s where we are: ruined training wheels, bike still good, evening in Greensboro. My wife looks through the window, and our boys, 5 and 3, or maybe 6 and 4, are riding their bikes in sweeping circles around the backyard. Everything’s fine. It’s a picture postcard, a home movie. Something’s off, though. It takes a minute. But then she sees it. Our older son is zipping lap after lap through the grass. The little one’s hot on his trail. The problem? The little one doesn’t know how to ride a bike.

In a backyard, you want enough room to throw a baseball. To put in some tomatoes. Maybe a hosta garden in the shade. A rope swing. A treehouse. Green, green grass. A little storage shed, or a full-on plumbed and heated writing shed. And maybe a patio, or even just a little gravel path, a spot that would work well for, say, bringing the socket set up from the basement, taking the mangled training wheels off your bike under the supervision of your older brother, and learning, seemingly in a lone attempt, how to ride a bike.

They ruined the yard that year. We didn’t have the heart to tell them to ride in the street. We joke, sometimes, that the little one is raising himself. All the littles probably are, in every family, to some extent. But I spent the better part of two weeks teaching the big one how to ride. The little one hadn’t even asked to take the training wheels off yet. He’s always been resilient, though, exactly the kind of kid who will teach himself to ride without the training wheels if you mash them with the van. Or if I do.

We spent an unfortunate, embarrassing amount of money resodding back there the next year. I like grass, even with all our shade, and so I’m forever adjusting with lime and fertilizer and pounds and pounds of shade seed. The problem trees, the shade trees, grow larger every year. So do the boys, who are back there this afternoon, one a pitcher and one a catcher, and they’re trying not to bean New Dog, she who is now the rightful owner of that space. She sits on the steps of the deck every day, paws crossed, waiting patiently for tasty woodland creatures to venture out, or for a delivery truck to rumble by. She lives a significant — by request, a paw on the glass of the kitchen storm door — portion of her waking life in the backyard.

It’ll be at its very greenest this June. Then it’ll thin out and die back, mud over in the winter, come back the next spring. Backyard as endless metaphor, as cycle, as circle. My neighbor had goats in her backyard for a while last year, eating ivy. New Dog could not believe her good fortune. The first two days: endless barking. Then she settled in, paws crossed, watching. Doing her job. Which is all the little one was doing all those years ago: growing up, his job. And what better space for that than a backyard?