It was the world back then. A garden to be tilled, a home for rabbits and chickens and dogs. Oh yes, cats too.
The backyard was longer and wider than I had the breath to run around. But, of course, I was always a puny kid.
Half of it for many years was a garden—corn in the back, then okra, many rows of potatoes and tomatoes, then radishes, mustard greens and onions. Sometimes a few petunias if my mother was in the mood. They made adequate trumpets, I recall.
To keep the garden alive during those scorching, drought-tinged Texas summers of the mid-fifties, my father and mother put the garden hose at the end of a row and let it run. Much to their chagrin, I often decided to dam up the works and create a lake, with branches seeping from one row to another. This also provided plenty of mud for various products like bricks, walls and pies. It also substituted for blood for my re-enactment of the Saturday matinee war movie. Then the hose was turned on me before I was allowed in the house.
But the garden isn’t there anymore. Not since my mother died.
The other half of the yard was for play—with my dogs. I always had a couple; then when one was run over and killed—which seemed altogether too common an occurrence—I still had one. They chased me, nipped at my heels, until I fell down and covered my head. They licked at my neck and I squealed with delight.
I learned the facts of life from cats. Kittens were as common as the rain was not in those days. I can think of no better education than the excitement of gingerly crawling under the house, softly calling out the mother cat’s name and have her return with a pleasant meow. I crawled closer, she proudly rolled over to show me her babies, their eyes still closed. If I dared pick them up too much they were gone the next day. The mother moved them.
My father built a hutch in the back and tried raising rabbits once. But that was a futile venture because he wanted to eat them and I wanted to play with them. Bantam chickens were safer. We both agreed only to eat the eggs. One day, however, I came home to find dead chickens over all the yard. One of the dogs acted sheepishly. I cried and then decided to grant amnesty. The law of the backyard was based on mercy.
And the playhouse. I could never forget that. It began as one small room with tin Royal Crown Cola signs for sides and roof. That didn’t seem large enough so I added another room with a wooden roof and a second floor.
To celebrate the expansion I invited a friend over to spend the night with my brothers and me. We watched “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and drank a concoction of mine made of Nehi orange, grape and strawberry and Upper Ten. Then we ventured out for the night. The sky was clear and the moon full. It was joyous. We danced and frolicked in our underwear at midnight. My friend’s shorts had monkeys on them. I teased him but secretly I was envious.
Somehow two rooms and a second floor didn’t seem enough. I doubled the bottom, and more lumber for roofing and even had a perch on top of the second floor.
A few years later my interest waned and my father wanted me to tear it down, but I didn’t have the heart. He relented and took it down himself. At one point he pushed apart two main posts and he bore a strange resemblance to Sampson, I thought.
Now I come home occasionally and the yard has changed. As I said, there is no garden. It is now an expanse of grass. I only vaguely spot where the rabbit hutch and the wonderful playhouse sat.
The only things that are the same are the honeysuckle vines and mimosa trees I planted for my mother many years ago. The trees are quite stout now.
It makes me feel old.
The smell of the honeysuckle is still sweet and brings back the memories, though. I have honeysuckle growing outside the door of the home I share with my wife and son. It makes me feel good. I want a large yard for my son to have adventures in, to learn responsibility in, a nice place to grow up.
But this yard, for all the world events that transpired within its reaches, seems so small now.
(Author’s note: I was twenty-seven when I wrote this commentary of growing up. I’m now sixty-nine. My father, brothers and wife have died. I haven’t seen my friend in almost fifty years. My son is forty-two. We have shared adventures and he has learned responsibility. The last time I drove past my childhood home another man was in the yard. He looked none too happy that I had slowed down to stare. How odd I felt old forty years ago. Now I feel age has no meaning. Being happy, making others happy. Being loved, loving others. That is the meaning of life.)