During the summer, our yard is a joyous calliope of color and texture. It would be an exaggeration to say that I am a planner when it comes to the landscaping around our home. It’s much more accurate to say I’m an impulse shopper. As the temperature finally rises in Chicago, my wild assortment of foliage comes into its disorderly splendor.

Lush pink peonies sag in billowing blooms over their frames below overgrown lilac bushes weighed down with blooms. The last of the tulips gives way to daffodils. Roses in the backyard explode in red flowers above black-eyed Susans, and waving wisps of fennel fronds are yet to bloom in the butterfly garden.

In the middle of this chaotic bounty, our backyard grass is a patchy eyesore. Part of this is willful neglect: I’m not much of a ‘yard’ person, preferring to spend time with my crazy flowering beauties instead and allowing grass to, well, do whatever it will do. And what it does is suffer.

This sad lawn is rendered even more of an eyesore due to dueling sports being practiced: one side is framed by a net to catch baseballs as they are smashed off a tee, the other side features a soccer goal, ready for action. The center section of what was once grass, and is now dirt, in front of each practice area is an ongoing project worthy of Sisyphus. From time to time, each summer, I will request a bag of grass seed from my husband’s DIY trips to the hardware store, and I’ll dutifully rake and seed and water those patches for weeks in a fruitless attempt at growing a few fill-in blades of grass.

Honestly, we didn’t buy a home to have a perfect yard; we bought it to have an imperfect yard filled with kids playing, but is it wrong to want a little bit of grass, too? Can’t a homeowner have it all? Don’t answer that.

This year, I tried to grow some grass again, with the same lack of results, and the patch suffered as usual. And then, in mid-June, my older son broke his collarbone in a soccer tournament. The diagnosis: No soccer this summer, for weeks and weeks and seemingly endless weeks.

For a 13-year-old whose every waking moment for the past few years has been soccer, this news was bad. For one whose whole summer was filled with sleepaway soccer camp, multiple skills camps with his travel teammates, and, looming just a few weeks away, high school soccer tryouts, it was heartbreaking.

Suddenly, the scarred lawn and goal, now empty and untrodden, were painful symbols of loss. I could have taken the absence of a player as an opportunity to reseed and try again, but it seemed appropriate for me to stay away, too. The ground felt almost sacred, waiting for the one who loves to be there and to tread upon it, juggling the soccer ball on one foot, one thigh, the other foot and around again, spinning and passing to himself, flicking the ball into the top corner, bottom corner, center and back around for hours on end.

Watching him play is a wonder to me. His young body can run and run and run forever, and the look of sheer joy on his face as he chases down the ball, spins around an opponent, flicks it over the player, and deftly picks it up again, makes my heart swell. Watching his face crumple in agony as the doctor gently gave him the diagnosis (so many weeks away from The Beautiful Game) broke my heart as well.

So now we wait. There are still weeks of summer to go, and we hope for some good news at his next checkup and set of X-rays. We’re lucky to have great care, concerned friends and family, and we’re grateful the injury wasn’t worse. For a few weeks, we all mourned this loss of time, of joy, of what seemed to be the essence of summer itself for a young teenager. He hid from us a bit, preferring to read or text on his phone in his room alone, and we gave him space. He puts on a brave face, says he’s fine, but he’s clearly struggling. As Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.

And behind our house, the grass seems to be waiting, too. A few weeds have crept in, but the grass has kept its distance as if to say, Why bother? He’ll be back soon enough.

The other afternoon, I heard a familiar rhythm outside—pop-pop-pop-pop… swoosh—and stepped to the window to find my son, sling strapped to his left arm, juggling a soccer ball with his feet. The ball arced perfectly into the net, and his grin was the first pure joy I’d seen in ages. I wanted to call out “be careful,” but it was far too late for that.

Someday, when there are no more boys at home to trample the lawn and the grass grows thick and lustrous, it still won’t be as perfect as it is today, tattered with flattened patches and worn to dirt by boys who love their games more than anything. For now, we wait for our warrior to return and leave glorious destruction in his wake.