Jan 12, 2011

What was the yard like?

HUGE!!! Especially when it came to mowing the lawn, picking the fruit, planting the garden and weeding the garden. It had to have been a full two acres or at least 1 and a half, well maybe just one, no it was a lot bigger than just one. The yard was made up of a lot of lawn, which I added to later in my teen years since I would rather push a power lawn mower than weed a garden. However when I was younger I liked weeding better than mowing since the lawn mower was a hard to push "push mower". The wheels made a blade turn against a bar that trapped the grass and cut it off. Only problem was that it was hard to push in long grass and we hated to mow so the grass grew as we put off mowing only making it worse. We did usually mow every saturday when mom could get us to do it along with helping do the wash. There were a lot of trees including 6 old apple trees, couple of cherry trees, apricot and pear and crab apples also. We had one green ash tree and several black walnut trees. Mom also planted a lot of other trees through the years with me getting to dig the holes usually when we planted them. She even planted a mighty Oak that dad mowed down several times until it gave up. He didn't mean to it was just that it was in the area where the wild grass grew and dad usually mowed that part.The lawn and garden were watered with irrigation water from the canal so it was always fun to play on the lawn when the water was on it. It was a beautiful yard too. Mom made sure there were alot of flowers and trees to make it that way. we had a playhouse in the lower part of the yard and an outdoor fireplace as well. It was always fun to have dinner out there and we had a lot of special meals there as well for different holiday during the summer. It was at the end of the road from town so we often had people drive in and turn around and drive back out but it was a fun place to grow up. It lent itself well to outdoor night games like "No Bears are out tonight", "kick the can", and "hide and seek". There was a hedge that mom had planted to kind of block the view of the clothesline from the rest of the yard so that made for a lot of good hiding places in that yard. It also made for a good place to change completely out of my clothes the day the skunk sprayed me on the way to work at 9:30 pm. It was dark and I never turned o the light to go out to the truck but should have that time.