The yard in front of our house was not overly large, but it always provided us with plenty of room to play. Whether we were jumping into piles of freshly raked leaves or playing a game of “red light green light” on the concrete walkway leading down to the road, we children were rarely bored. The yard was “fenced” off from our neighbor’s yard (my aunt Jessie was our neighbor for many years, so it didn’t keep us out of her yard by any means) by a wall of tall lilac bushes. I remember the overwhelming scent of the lilac flowers bourne on a gentle breeze. Between the lilacs and the road was a huge oak tree on the corner of our lot. This was just one of three oaks that provided us with ammunition for our acorn fights. A couple of maples and beeches were spread around the front yard as well. With all these trees, shade was abundant in the summer months and I would often sit in a beach chair and read novels or comic books to escape the heat in our house. A single stunted mountain laurel provided beautiful white flowers in the late summer and fall.

For many years a wooden picnic table sat off to the side, in front of the lilacs and behind a path worn into the grass by the contstant bike and foot traffic leading past the big oak and down towards the road. Moving around to the side of the house, a couple of shady pines provided more shade and a beech leaned out towards the house where it’s trunk had been broken by the strong wind and ice of a winter storm. We didn’t work hard to take care of the trees, and we knew one day this one would finally give way and fall onto the roof. Hopefully, it wouldn’t cause any damage when it did! The wall on this side of the house was weather beaten due to the peeling white paint that no longer provided much protection from tree-splattered rainfall. Towards the left side and just beyond these trees was the low, wide stump of an old weeping willow that often served as an alternative “base” for my Star Wars action figures. One of my earliest memories of a budding interest in phtography was setting up my figures and taking pictures of them on this stump. Over the years, that stump was also the target of our knives and hatchets and throwing stars.

Now moving towards the rear of our house, the visitor was greeted by just a single tree in the center of the back yard. Grass — sometimes a foot high — covered the ground as far as about 40 feet from the house. At this point, our old “garden” area became a tangle of sumac trees and grass. At one point, we had planted and maintained a large garden in this area. It provided vegetables for a couple of years, but our interest waned and the garden became overgrown. The tree that grew in the cleared area of the yard was planted by my father around the time I was born. As I grew, so did it and it became one of my favorite trees to climb into and sit among it’s branches in my early teens. Flanking my tree was an old tree trunk that served to anchor one end of our clothesline. The other end was attached to the rear wall of the house. In the autumn and winter winds, the aluminum wheels of those pulleys would rattle and squeak as we sat indoors. In the summer, I would often follow my mother as she hung the wet laundry on the line. I can still remember the sounds of wooden clothespins being dropped into the bottom of the milkjug we used to store and carry them.