Photo by RICK BOGREN, LSU AgCenter -- Sprinklers arc across a Louisiana lawn -- a sure sign that summer has arrived.

Photo by RICK BOGREN, LSU AgCenter -- Sprinklers arc across a Louisiana lawn -- a sure sign that summer has arrived.

We’ve started the summer by planting a few new hollies, along with a Japanese magnolia and some hydrangeas to soften the look of the fence line. They’ll all need frequent watering to survive the season’s dry spells until their roots deepen. These days, dusk often finds me moving sprinklers around the yard, a ritual that can have its comic moments, too.

I sometimes feel too lazy to turn off the tap when shifting a sprinkler from one bed to the next. As an expedient, I grip the hose a few feet from its head, as if grabbing the tail of a cobra, then drag the sprinkler to its next spot while it’s still shooting out a wide fan of water.

I try to do this without getting too wet, the latest version of a contest I’ve been having with sprinklers since I was a boy. I grew up on a plant nursery, which meant a multitude of sprinklers hissing across long Louisiana summers. Deep in my Walter Mitty phase, I imagined them as German machine gun nests, dodging each one on my way to the porch. Sometimes, defeated by the heat of a merciless July, I surrendered to their spray, happy to get soaked to the bone before supper. My mother, I suspect, wasn’t quite so pleased.

While it’s one thing for a third-grader to dodge sprinklers, the pastime looks a bit different when attempted by a man who can now qualify for membership in AARP. The other day, as I darted from the oscillating shower that shot across my lawn, I wondered what my kids would have thought if they had spotted their dad running through the grass like a headless chicken. They grew up on a steady diet of such spectacles — abiding proof that their old man, whatever his virtues, wasn’t entirely right in the head.

But I didn’t have to worry about being sprinkler-shamed by my daughter and son. They’re both grown now and living far away. As another Father’s Day approaches, I find myself in the empty nest phase of parenthood, a season of life that can also mean an empty yard to myself. It’s a luxury my wife and I couldn’t have imagined in those happy, hectic years when children trailed us like paparazzi through bright weekends outdoors.

In those days, any garden chore became an impromptu news conference as one child or another — sometimes both — tugged at our sleeves with questions while we planted a Drake elm or weeded a flower bed.

The backyard is quieter now, though I sometimes hear my young neighbor being interrogated by his toddler as he tends a tomato or tinkers with a weed trimmer. This new father is learning what I came to know, what every dad eventually does.

Fatherhood places you on a stage, the attention sometimes glaring but mostly welcome. Done properly, it’s the role of a lifetime.

Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.

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