Challenge Part 2

A friend of mine is taking a writing course and I thought it might do me some good to play along.  He sent me the syllabus.  Part one was to do some reading.  It was a story about this kids yard.  It was based in a rural, farmland setting so I had no reference point.  But I read it.  Part two is to write some thoughts on it.  Part three is to write 400 words about my childhood home or yard.  Follows.

My childhood yard was okay. The backyard wasn't particularly big, but it was a solidly, middle middle-class size nonetheless. It was the sort of backyard you'd pick up at Sears. It was a good value for my parents, who had to save up to get it. Some wealthy people get big backyards from their mother, like the Kardashian sisters. Their mother married a rich lawyer. He defended celebrities against the sort of legal trouble they get into, like driving while drunk, drug use, and murdering their ex-wives.

Anyway, I used to have to mow the lawn. I didn't mind doing that chore because I liked to make the lines in the grass line up. Our grass wasn't the best but our lines were. It looked like the infield of a major league baseball diamond. It was easiest to go east-west but I'd change it every week or so and go north-south or southeast-northwest. Later on my parents put a gazebo in the center of the backyard and that made getting the lines lined up quite a bit harder, but that just made it more of a challenge. They got the gazebo because my mother liked to imagine herself sitting in it and my father liked the thought of taking pictures of people standing in front of it. By that time I was a teenager and didn't use the backyard much myself since it didn't contain anything I wanted to smoke.

Before the gazebo arrived and my older brother departed for California, I'd play generalized sports with him. My Dad never did anything with me - like he was supposed to. So, my brother filled in. He is eight years older than me so he was always better at everything which used to make me real mad. We'd play catch with a frisbee and I got pretty good. If you threw it a certain way it would fly in parabolas, or if you held it level upon release, it would fly as straight as Tom Cruise. If it was windy the wind would catch it at the last second, the frisbee would rise a few inches, and hit you in the face. Sometimes I would miss a catch or didn't want to catch it in the first place because my brother threw it too fucking hard, and then it would crash into the aluminum siding on the back of the garage.

The neighbors must have hated that sound.

My Dad must have hated all those dents in the siding.

He never said a word about them.