Trees

It's a chilly, windy Friday – so glad I don't have to sit out for a football game tonight! And I don't envy all the parents who will be bundling up later. May their evening go by fast!

I've finished up five of my counted cross-stitch Christmas decorations so far. It's good to know I'm nearly halfway done. I should have started the next one today – I guess the day's not over yet, so I still could get that done.

The leaves are coming down and the ground is carpeted now, especially with today's wind. It makes us so happy that we had our big old oak tree taken down a few years ago. This tree was huge, and the person who removed it estimated its age was 150. I hated to see it go, but it had developed a habit of dropping its big limbs at very inopportune times – and on the house. We were fortunate to only have a little damage from them.

We miss the shade – but heavens! The hours I used to spend raking leaves. The back yard was covered, the front yard was covered. Leaves blew under the back porch and under the front porch, as well as in the carport. Leaves caught in the bushes growing in the fenceline. At the time, I could burn the leaves, so I would rake everything to the drainage ditch in front of the house and spend an afternoon burning them. I'm so glad I don't have to do that any longer.

We had all kinds of trees in the yard at the farm. I have memories of helping shovel snow, but I don't really remember raking leaves. Maybe we just let them blow away. We had a black walnut tree very close to the house and I do remember hearing the walnuts hit the roof and roll off – and I remember heading out to the bus and stepping on walnuts as they rolled out from under my feet.

We would usually crack open a few of those walnuts to see if they were good or not. If the majority of what we checked were good, we would make more of an effort to pick up the nuts and crack them. Very few things in life are better than homemade chocolate fudge with black walnuts! In the years we didn't have good walnuts, we would just leave them for the squirrels. We always had a family of squirrels in one particular tree in the yard, and they did a stellar job of picking up the nuts for us.

Several trees in the our back yard served as poles for Mom's clothesline. In fact, we only had one actual clothesline pole. Amazingly, I don't remember our having any issues with “bird residue” on the clean clothes! We were lucky.

When I was really small, there was a swing in that walnut tree by the front porch. I spent hours there. As I got a little older, the swing moved to a tree on the opposite side of the yard – and instead of a board swing, there was a tire swing. I used that for a really long time. And under a maple tree at the edge of the yard was a sandbox. Later, Dad used some scrap wood and made me some kitchen equipment. That also went under that tree, along with a metal table and chair set I had. In the summer, all my play dishes and kitchen equipment stayed outside in that cabinet, ready for me to play whenever I wanted. Many years later, my own kids enjoyed playing under that tree with that kitchen stuff.

With all those trees in the yard, you'd think I would have learned to climb trees – not so. We did have a small cherry tree in the back yard that I conquered – and I spent hours in that tree, including a time or two escaping Mom's wrath. She would simply walk away with a reminder that I had to come down sooner or later.....and that the longer it took, the worse the results would be. She was right.

It's nice to drive down the street now and see all the pretty leaves on the ground – and to know that we don't need to get out our rake!