The field at Phillips answered summer with cow fennel and overgrowth.  
The president sent us to do something about it.  Thus began OFA’s National Summer of Service.
Swing blades did not arrive Saturday, so we attacked the overgrowth at the bus stop location on Highway 41 with suburban equipment, hedge cutters and lopping shears.  Snakes fled.
The tangle yielded. Soon the corner was ready for a bench. When that 20th of an acre was done, we were proud.
The Phillips volunteers, residents since their village was part of countryside, advised us the main work area was larger, three acres.
I have lived in I’On and Charleston. I don’t understand what an acre is. We loaded our domestic push mowers into the pickups and headed for the activity field.
Three acres covered with weeds and broken sticks are really large when you attack them with a 22-inch push mower.
Children from the community helped pick up the sticks and limbs. Adults hauled them to a burn pile. Black hands transferred work to white hands. Old hands reached out to help start reluctant mowers pushed by young ones.
One push mower makes little impact on a large field, but five roaring mowers being pushed by a rotating team of volunteers can saw away at a big job in the heat.
Vernon Owens, strapped on his camelback hydration system, pulled the tube which delivered cool water around from his back to his mouth and began pushing his mower through the dust and heat. Each of the four trips along one side of the big square shortened eight feet with every pass.
Outside the diminishing square, the tender, young centipede grass Richard Habersham had spent the precious funds of the community association to seed last spring was discovered spreading in the sun, now strengthened in its contest against the overgrowth.
Volunteers ripped open the cartons containing the new picnic tables paid for with donations.  
I sent one young woman to get a tool. She looked into the back of the pickup and asked, “which one is the wrench?” Once she had met the tool, she mastered how it worked and helped bring the two tables together.
Our neighborhoods should include safe places for our children to play, to make ours a stronger, healthier nation.
As the heat rose and work slowed, two groups, one white, one black gathered in the shade.
After we threatened to desegregate the project with some of the community building techniques learned in training, everyone mixed it up on their own. Community is constructed in sun and heat, but bonded in the shade.
Phillips cooked lunch.  Nobody was missing the Gazpacho I forgot to bring when the ribs and chicken came off the grill.
We sat on the new tables, letting the breeze pull the sweat off our bodies and talked about our kids, our communities and our country.
Beyond the shade, the new field in Phillips, clean of sticks, grew grass in the sun.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com, http://twitter.com/wjhamilton29464) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village)