When I was young, my parents lived in a lovely house with a large hill in the backyard. The hill was perfect for sledding and all the neighborhood kids would spend hours in the winter sledding down the hill and climbing back up. In the summertime, we’d roll and tumble down that hill and it was loads of fun.
But after a heavy rainfall, we dreaded the hill. You see, my father planted a rock-garden when we were small, and it sat at the head of the hill. It was landscaped with small evergreen bushes and hardy flowering plants, all surrounded with the red lava-rock popular in the garden centers at the time.
When a big storm came through town, the drainage ditch behind our backyard fence would overflow, quickly saturating my dad’s rock garden and eventually filling it with a pool of water. As the pool grew deeper and deeper, the porous lava rocks would rise with the water and, in not too much time, begin to sluice down our great big hill. It was our own Midwestern version of a “rockslide,” and while it never caused our yard or home any damage, it was damaging to my brothers’ and my psyches.
For the following day, when the weather had cleared and the sun was shining once more, we were handed our little beach buckets and told to “pick up rocks” in the yard. We couldn’t risk one of them getting caught in dad’s lawnmower, after all.
The tedium! The torture! My brothers and I were surely under 10 years old, and were forced to spend a sunlight morning (and sometimes the afternoon as well!) picking up rocks by the bucketful and returning them, up the hill, to the rock garden. Hundreds of rocks! Thousands of rocks! All had to be plucked one by one from the grass and transported up that hill. Up and down up and down until the job was done. Sometimes little creepy crawlies also became dislodged from the rock garden in the downpour, and these were duly uncovered in the picking-up process and used for teasing and taunting … well, what else were bugs good for?
Many years later, when I was grown and my parents had moved from that house, I asked my dad why he never took those darn rocks out of the garden the first time the ditch overflowed? My adult mind knows he could have replaced them with shredded bark mulch or heavier stones that would have withstood the rising water and stayed in place. “I don’t know why,” Dad replied. “I guess I thought it was good exercise for you kids, and it never really rained that hard that often.”
Ah, the difference between a task seen from a child’s vantage point and a parent’s! What to one is a good bit of exercise on a sunny day – a job worth doing – is to a child an event of much misery and disaster! In retrospect, it has given me a good story to tell about my parents’ ways of raising us kids. But I much prefer to use a good water-loving mulch in my own gardens these days!
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