MEMORIES PT22

Moving from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston to the suburban community
of Abington was quite an adjustment. I used to envy my Packard cousins who lived
in the nearby town of Hanson, imagining what it might be like to live “out in the
country” with a big lawn and with a collie.(The Packards had a beautiful collie).
Well, we had a medium sized lawn but the back yard was much larger. I was 
soon introduced to that institution of suburban teenage life:mowing the lawn.

Of course since the house was a newly built one, there were a few things that 
needed to be dealt with first. For one thing, most of the back yard was overgrown 
with weeds when we moved in. The houses on Bicknell Hill Rd were built on lots 
that used to be part of Wright’s Farm, so the weeds looked like a farm field in 
miniature. And there were rocks scattered about in there from construction. So 
Dad went out and bought what looked like a golf club with a serrated edge and we 
took turns “whacking” away at the weeds until we’d cut them down a bit. Then we
went through and found the rocks. and afterwards came the lawn mower which 
for at least the first summer was an old manual push mower.

The front lawn was a bit better, but for some reason they builders had left a small 
mound of dirt right next to the lamp post on the front yard which had sprouted 
another bunch of weeds that had to be whacked clean. Eventually that was 
cleared and leveled off.

One of the cool things about our new house was the big living room with the picture
window and the fireplace. It was nice to sit by the fire. It was not so nice dealing with
the woodpile. Dad would call upon his Maine roots and go out and get the logs. 
These were stacked outside at the edge of the backyard and every Fall I’d haul them 
downstairs into the cellar so they’d be available to be brought upstairs to feed the 
fire.  Then every Spring I would haul them back upstairs to be piled and added to for 
the following fall.

The romantic notion I had of living in the country wore off VERY quickly!

((388 words))

Written for the Family History Writing Challenge