If you’ve ever watched The Little Rascals, you’ll have a sense of what my sister, Linda, and I were like when we were kids. I’m not saying we were ‘rascals’ per se, I’m just sayin’ those little rascals had nothing on us, that’s for sure!
My sister, Linda and I lived for summers. The minute school was out, we were literally free as birds for the next three or so months. To say we were unsupervised is an understatement. If we had died between 8 a.m. (breakfast) and 12 noon (lunch), or between 12:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. (time to get cleaned up for dinner) no one would have noticed. Daddy was at work. Mother was frantically busy taking care of a kitchen garden, our bigger garden and orchard (used for canning and freezing fruits and vegetables), keeping up a one-acre lawn that she mowed weekly, and maintaining several beautiful flower beds. On top of that she had a house to keep clean (I will say spotless, actually), three meals a day to cook for all of us, laundry that she hung on the clotheslines to dry, and watching after our baby brother, Dale. The woman never stopped moving. But keeping tabs on two young girls was not part of her day. She sent us off to “play” between meals, and “play” we did!
Every now and then our play had unintended consequences.
For example, one beautiful summer day Linda and I headed out to the stable to find something to do. There was an old two-wheeled trailer parked nearby that Daddy would use now and then to haul garbage to the dump, or for some other hauling job. We decided that it would be fun to climb into the trailer and see if we could get it to balance by standing in the middle and inching our weight toward the tail gate (there actually was no gate on the tail) until the heavy end (the end with the coupler, tongue, and hitch ball) was up in the air.
OK. Maybe not the smartest game in the world, but hey, we were maybe 8 or 9 and bored! Now this was sort of fun, but then Linda had this idea (it probably was my idea but I will blame Linda). I was going through my “I want to be a trapeze artist” phase, and so she thought it would be cool if we could inch our way toward the open end of the trailer so the heavy part was in the air, then she’d jump off, and the trailer would flip me up into the air and I could do a summersault and land on the ground, and take my bow. Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Let’s just say I broke my arm (again), and Mother spent the afternoon in the emergency ward with me.
We didn’t really think that one through!
Another lovely, summer afternoon, Daddy came home for lunch (he often drove home from his office/shop in town to eat lunch) and found Linda and me mooning around, complaining of nothing to do (never a smart move around Daddy). Before he went back to work, he called us into the garage where he armed us with two paint brushes and a can of aluminum (metallic silver) paint. He told us that the corrugated metal pump cover around the well needed to be painted to keep it from rusting. We probably didn’t even hear the rusting part of the instructions. All we could see is a big can of shiny paint and two brushes.
Oh boy!
Daddy headed back to work, and Linda and I headed over to the well and started painting. It was suchfun. But it didn’t take long, and we sure had a lot of paint left, so we decided to really help Daddy out and paint the pump and the pump handle too.
Oooh, pretty.
Still a lot of paint left. Looked around and saw the metal flashing around the bottom of the corncrib was kind of rusty looking. So we painted that, too.
What else? Oh, the flagpole. There was a gray metal flagpole in the middle of mother’s rock-rimmed circular flower bed in the side yard. It looked kind of drab. So we painted that up as high as we could reach (not very). But when we started painting Mother’s rocks around her beautiful flower bed, she came out of the house, caught us red-(or silver)-handed and stopped us dead. No paint would besmirch her beautiful big rocks! But by then the paint can was almost empty anyway.
Daddy liked to tell the story that late that afternoon as he topped the hill on the road home, the sun was shining on our little farm, which, in his words “sparkled like a Christmas tree full of tinsel.” He got mad at us at first, then laughed, after he decided it was actually pretty funny. Mother was not so amused. (We had to clean the rocks we had defaced.)
Clearly, Daddy didn’t think this through. Maybe it’s a family trait?
Leave a Reply