The fun we had
Furniture? Lawn furniture for our house on Ogden Road in Lake Carmel?
Well, there were two saw horses that came and went as needed.
They supported my father’s carpentry projects, the old boat that we fixed up and, from time to time a piece of plywood that served as a table.
Chairs came out as needed from the kitchen. We never had anything that resembled lawn furniture except when my Dad made lawn furniture chairs for the living room of our house in Brooklyn out of the packing crates that he stored in the shed in the woods behind the back yard.
A fire pit?
There was a jumble of cinder blocks, rocks and an old furnace grate that my grandfather used to heat water and that we, if the occasion arose, would use to cook hot dogs which we washed down with homemade rootbeer.
Even after we had a well and reliable potable water, we kept the rain barrels, their water for the garden and for washing your hair into a softness that no modern product can yield.
There was the summer that we raised chickens or the two summers when my Aunt Lucy’s 1931 Model A lived in the back yard, unable to move.
My mother put pots of geraniums on the running boards until my father’s brothers came from Brooklyn to rescue it.
We played catch in the back yard.
My brother taught me how to hit a softball in the back yard. Neighbors would wander in on soft evenings to chat, perhaps share a bit of baked goods.
Kids would come over after dinner to play in the woods or sit in one of the always needing cleaning hammocks. That was our yard.
We never had a power mower, unless you counted kid muscle power.
If the grass got mowed at all it was with the old fashioned push mower the blades of which my grandfather sharpened with a rectangular stone.
The yard was bordered by my grandmother’s vegetable garden with its rhubarb and gooseberry plants, my mother’s flower border, the compost pile and the back of the house where the clothes line began.
I sat this morning, reading the ads for faux wicker lawn furniture, all decked out with sunbrella covered pillows and people dressed in trendy clothes.
The furniture surrounded a faux stone fire pit while a casually dressed hostess passed pilsner glasses full of beer.
I wondered if we couldn’t use some of this furniture on our patio. But then I remembered the fun we had with our Ogden Road collection and put the ads in the trash.
