Monday, January 30, 2012

Working in the Yards

JOURNAL JAR:  Describe your yard as a child-- did you help with the yardwork?

Since we moved around quite a bit when I was a kid, I didn't have just one yard.  But I do remember doing yardwork.

When we lived on Bel Ayre Drive in what was then San Jose but is now Santa Clara, I learned how to mow the lawn.  I was about eight or so, and our neighbor, Johnny Pope, helped teach me how to take care of the yard, along with my dad.

There were two trees in the front yard-- one was a fruitless mulberry tree, with big leaves.  The other one was something different, with lots of small leaves.  I remember raking leaves one time, and being bored with the process of raking into a pile, then putting the piles into bags.  So I raked everything behind one of the bushes along the side of the house-- kind of hid the leaves there.  Got in trouble for that.

Our back yard at Bel Ayre was big-- there were fruit trees and a oval shaped lawn area, along with a space behind the detached garage that my grandpa planted a garden in.  We had peach trees, a lemon tree, and an orange tree that gave the best oranges I've ever had.  So juicy and sweet.

Befor Bel Ayre we lived on Blossom Hill Road.  Our front yard had lawn with a slope towards the sidewalk, so I could get started on my bike easily.  The back yard didn't have much but pea gravel when we first moved in.  But my dad put in a large concrete patio complete with a built-in bbq pit.  And we planted a garden between the houses with our neighbors.

We moved to Lucchesi from Bel Ayre.  Lucchesi was interesting because there was no dirt.  It was all sand.  Even when we dug down and installed our Doughboy pool, it was sand all the way down.  So no lawns and stuff there.  Just some iceplant.  We only lived there a year before we moved to Escalon.

Escalon is where I did my best yard work.  For a while, I had the front yard down to a science.  The back yard is so big that it's still being worked on, as in "installed."  I put in the lawn and sprinklers years ago, but they had to be redone because the renters and lanscapers caused a lot of wear and tear.  I did a nice job of installing the yard, but I never did get a picture of the finished project.  Oh well.

1 comment:

Deb said...

The backyard is a work in progress. You always had a knack for making things look so nice, and I was always bored by the work. I still don't like to do yard work-- even planting flowers *yawn*. Plus, I have the knack of killing anything that once was green.