Memories from the Jar - Yardwork

I still haven't come up with a creative way to title my life history entries, so I'm still up for any suggestions...c'mon, I know there are lots of creative people out there!

In the meantime, here's today's paper strip:

"Describe your yard as a child. Did you help with the yard work?"

I just have to start by answering that question--um, YEAH...as a kid I was convinced that yardwork was the only thing I did!! But now I'll back up a little.

Our yard growing up was really quite large, I think my parents owned half an acre or more on a corner lot. We lived in the tiny town of Fountain Green, Utah...most people had pretty big lots, I think. I'm sure land was just a little cheaper than it is here in So. Cal. :) Anyway, we had a big front lawn with a sidewalk that cut across part of it and went up to the front porch. In the gap created between the sidewalk and the house was my mom's beautiful flower garden. She definitely has a green thumb and is great with flowers. Our yard was not fenced in--we lived on a dirt road, no sidewalks, so the lawn just kind of tapered out into the road in front. Along the north side of the house was another pretty good sized chunk of lawn, also leading out to another dirt road, but bordered by a ditch...must have been an irrigation ditch back in the day, but when I was a kid we mainly used it to dump our kitchen scraps in (no garbage disposal in my childhood home). Between the ditch and the house were three or four fruit trees. The memorable thing about those fruit trees, though, was that my mom must have planted them when I was in elementary school, but when we moved out of that house when I was sixteen years old, they were still tiny. For some reason, those trees just never grew. Every spring, the twiggy little trees would blossom, and I would get all excited, imagining a great harvest of apricots or apples. It never quite happened. I think they may have actually produced an apple or two, but they were very stunted. The backyard was also really big, and at least half of it was tilled up and devoted to our enormous vegetable garden. Behind the garden was the fenced in pasture with a chicken coop and big, open shed where we kept a supply of firewood for the wood-burning stove that we used to heat our house in the winter. We also often had sheep in the pasture...my grandpa is a sheep man and we used to take care of bummer lambs from his herd, and then later we raised and trained show lambs. So, the pasture was put to good use with animals, but also stood empty sometimes and made a great place to play. I spent a lot of time outside in the yard as a kid. On the north side of the house was the driveway, and then a steep little patch of grass that I loved to roll down, though the hill was short and you could never build up much momentum before you rolled into the neighbor's fence.

And yardwork...oh my, yes, I did plenty of that! My parents were firm believers in teaching us to work, and the yard was an ideal place for it. The garden was a great source of pain as well as pleasure for me and my siblings while we were growing up. We faithfully planted that vegetable garden, year after year, as it was an important source of food for us during the summer and we preserved a lot of it for the winter as well. All summer long, while my friends were sleeping in, my parents had us up before the sun came up so that we could weed the garden before it got too hot outside. Despite their efforts, we spent lots of time in the sun as the garden was so big, and the weeds so numerous, that we never finished before the heat got intense. I remember clearly taking on weeds that were taller than I was, pulling with all my strength only to have the weed break off at the dirt, leaving the root still in the ground. My mom would then come over and dig at it with the shovel to loosen the dirt, I'd yank and pull, and sometimes, if I was lucky, I'd get the whole root. More often than not I just got enough to cover up the root and hope she wouldn't notice.

The garden really was a source of happiness for us as well. I grew to absolutely love the vegetables we grew, especially corn and tomatoes. I loved to see my mom turn the vegetables we harvested into a delicious meal. We also had a huge raspberry patch...very few of those raspberries actually made it into the house. It was too easy to just eat them as you picked them. They would often be ripening as school started in the fall, and I remember that I would have to pass the garden on my way home from the bus stop after school. Many times I stopped at the garden and got my fill of fresh raspberries before I headed into the house after school. Mmm, yummy!

I also did my part taking care of the lawn, which included watering and mowing. My mom, in her very organized way, would draw up a diagram of the lawn, dividing it into equal parts, and let us choose which part we would mow. Then we all took turns mowing our chunk of the lawn. This was how I discovered that whoever built our house didn't spend too much time worrying about whether or not the ground was level before they planted grass. That was a seriously bumpy lawn! I still remember a distinct dip on the north side lawn, and the bumpiness in the back lawn where the septic tank was buried.

We complained a lot about yardwork and gardening as kids, but it's interesting to note that now that we're all grown up, most if not all of us either have gardens of our own, or have had one at some point. It goes to show how much influence our parents' persistence in teaching us these skills had in what we do now! And I actually do hope that when we own our own home someday, that we'll have a nice big lawn and garden so I can teach my kids to work like my parents taught me.