Like many of my fellow baby boomers, I found myself helping with the mowing at my parents’ house as my dad grew older. What I considered a chore when I lived at home was now a chance to reminisce as I rode the lawn mower around the place I grew up.
I usually started in the front yard, and soon was taken back to each and every Thanksgiving, when we always had a big family get-together (and have continued to for more than 60 consecutive years now). The front yard became the site of a major football bowl game — usually the boys versus the girls and the uncles. Some of us cousins played as children and now we have grandchildren who play. I remember fast runs, fantastic catches, dramatic touchdowns and the sound of shouting kids.
Our front porch served as a Western town, where, playing Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, my sister and I kept law and order. Sometimes it was a town I saved when I was The Lone Ranger (really lone once my sister got old enough to balk at being Tonto).
As I moved to the side yard and mowed over what was my old basketball court, I thought of imaginary championships played there usually ending with me making a long winning shot at the buzzer.
Our big wooden picnic table was in the backyard, and with a sawhorse on one end to prop your feet on, it became a stagecoach. I rode shotgun many times while battling stagecoach robbers. It was also Davy Crockett’s riverboat, Flash Gordon’s spaceship. The seats also became helicopter skids that we could jump off of, just like the soldiers (only a little older than we were) did every night on the news in early reports from a place called Vietnam.
The backyard led to the pasture. In my imagination it became the Great Plains, and I led many a wagon train to safety across it, exploring uncharted territory all the way to the woods, at least until lunchtime.
At the opposite end of the house, there was a big gum tree and a huge catalpa tree that dominated that part of the yard, making a canopy of sorts where their limbs touched. Our treehouse was in the catalpa, becoming alternately Tarzan’s home or the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. With various cousins, we successfully ran poachers out of the jungle or defended against attacking pirates. In the summer, that area was lush and green, perfect for jungle warfare on a Pacific island, or in winter, a forest in Germany when playing World War II.
Our entertainment as kids was whatever our young imaginations could create. No rules, no organized and timed “play dates,” no parental supervision, no expensive toys for props, just kids having fun.
However, as wonderful as the memories were, they would fade into the background as I finished and shut down the mower, bringing me back to the present.
Now the treehouse is gone and Hurricane Katrina finished the job on the catalpa tree that lightning started. The flood of 2016 ruined the house and it had to be demolished. The Thanksgiving celebration and football game has been moved elsewhere, along with the memories of beloved parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and some of the cousins who are no longer with us.
Like so many of the childhood places I visited in my mind while aboard my time machine, these are only memories now, but they are oh-so-precious memories.
— Bond lives in Denham Springs.
