What beautiful weather the last few days! I have really been busy and am in the zone so I am getting some shit done. I have been busting my ass and needed to take a break from the work for a walk then came back to do more work.

Since it froze and killed off the meat-eating insects, I took a walk back on my land. If I had done this any earlier I would have been consumed alive by those carnivorous li’l bastards and life would have been miserable for several days.

It was nice to get out for a walk around the land. It is pretty overgrown; maintaining property like this is a non-stop endeavor and with both my mom being so sick it was pretty traumatic for my dad and he just kind of gave up on many things and one was taking care of things.

He was already falling behind on things with his age and just could not do the things that needed to be done so when my mom died and he gave up it just got worse. Again, it is a lot of work for a healthy younger person.

I am starting behind the curve so it is really tough catching up and one person just cannot do it with limited funds and no equipment to do the maintenance. The fields are really tall, there are several downed trees for firewood, and the forest is overgrown.

As I walked around I took a trip down memory lane, thinking about growing up here. No…I did not get all weepy or even misty-eyed and longing for days gone by.

My family built the house in 1968-69. We moved from Kansas City to here after selling our house. We lived with my paternal grandparents until it got to the point we could move into and live in the basement of this house while we finished the upstairs. (For those who have been a long-time reader of this blog, at my grandparent’s place during this time is when the infamous “old-drunken-guy-with-a-butcher-knife-wandering-around-in-his-underwear-next-to-the-truck-my-cousin-and-I sleeping-in-the-bed-of”incident. took place.)

Of course the work on the house was ongoing until completed. One particular spot in the wooded area I went through was where we would have a table set up and go back to eat outdoors and enjoy the day.

One of those days there was a bit of a problem. It was summer and my cousin, me, and one of the neighbor kids from the house next door in Kansas City decided to go light firecrackers. There were no disposable lighters in those days so we had a box of wooden matches.

I was striking and holding the matches while my cousin lit the Black Cats and tossed them. We had a big time. Then…disaster. I had dropped a lit match and the grass was very dry. It went up in a hurry and spread like…well, wildfire.

No cell phones in those days so somebody ran to the neighbors house and they called the fire department (no 911) . They were farmers and the people my folks bought the land from. He hopped on a tractor and came racing back to start plowing a fire line. Fire trucks came and it was finally out.

I was also thinking about some of the things my friends and I did. Makes me laugh to remember some of the things we did.

Back by the woods we would camp in the field, then go into the wooded area and play hide and seek. All night long in the dark. During one of these all-nighters one friend was running in the dark and ran into a barb-wire fence face-first. Another time someone else hit a different barb-wire fence and cut his knee open. Both times they probably should have gone to the ER but we were young and bulletproof. They just laughed it off and we continued waiting for sunrise, which I saw many of growing up – just to see if we could stay up all night.

Thee is a highway in front of the house so one night really late three of us decided to be ghosts. We would dress up in a sheet and wait until the car headlights would shine up he road and run across like a ghost (not the usual reason people in the midwest used to put on a sheet). WTF were we thinking?!?! 🤣

It was really late – a common theme to our shenanigans – and one friend put on the sheet and dash across the road. The car came to a screeching halt and…uh-oh! I crawled in the drainage pipe under the driveway, another person ran up behind the house, and the guy in the sheet just dropped in the yard and acted like he was asleep.

The guy in the car saw right through that excuse…especially since he was the County Sheriff in his off-duty car. We never got in trouble but it is still a funny story to have happened.

Growing up phone service was not real widespread in the “country” areas and when there was service you HAD to rent your phone from the phone company (no other options and you could not buy it). Another thing was the “party line”. It was the bane of teenage existence. You basically shared a phone line with other houses. We were lucky and only shared with two or three other houses. Each house had its own unique ring, so one might ring three times, one might ring twice. And if you picked up the phone to make a call you had to see if the neighbors were using the phone. It sucked.

This place…my parents were so proud of it. They planned it, built it, lived in it, and it was definitely home for them in the truest sense.

It was good to think about those things all those years ago, but you know me – I always look forward. The past is just that, but there will always be memories good & bad, great & absolute shit. I do not think about those things normally but being back there walking around triggered some memories for me. Probably the biggest memory was that of my parents.

I really miss them.