The Journal Jar - Question 94

Leave links to your answers at Promise's The Journal Jar.

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

Well....this should be relatively easy.  My first memory of our yard was when we lived in Chapel Hill, TX (right outside of Tyler) and we had a small farm.  Grew tons of stuff and had a dog named Butch.  I can very distinctly remember running through the corn rows that towered above me.  I think I must have been about 3 or 4.

Then in 1969, when I was 5, we moved to Tyler, TX and the house my Dad still lives in.  We have 3acres of land with the house sitting in the middle.  The front yard was landscaped with roses, pine trees, magnolias, and crepe myrtles.  The back yard slowly sloped up to boarder the woods.  We had a huge garden.  At the back edge of our property we had some pretty huge trees and took advantage of their presence by eagerly climbing them.  Once a limb broke and I fell.  To this day I can't believe all I broke was a finger.

My Dad had this huge tractor to mow the yard.  Being a tractor it didn't have a bagger.  Depending on how high the grass was at the time, depended on if we kids had to rake it up.  We did have to rake and gather leaves in the fall.  We also helped out in the garden quite a bit, plus we each had our own little "patch" we were supposed to take care of by ourselves.  My Mom would dump the scraps from dinner at the back edge of our lot and I used to love watching the fox come up and grab something to eat.  We used to wander through the woods and had our own private retreat under our "special tree".  One time we were being mischievous and trecked through the woods to the watermelon patch neighboring the woods and stole a watermelon.  We thought this was such a great idea we did it again...but God must have been getting onto us cause the next time we got lost.  We never stole anymore watermelons after that!

In 1980 we got a pool!  We each had to take turns cleaning the darn thing.  Hard to do before the days of the automatic cleaning devices that are available today.

I love our house and definitely as a kid...the yard was cool, cool, cool!