Autumn
Reminisce
2002
It felt really great helping in the kitchen when I was a child. Helping all around the house, actually. We all had jobs, you see. Dad went to work during the business day, and Mom went to night school to finish her degree. I went to preschool and played and helped around the house. Yeah, it seemed entirely logical to me at the time, and still kind of does.
At various points, I went to elementary school, Mom became the designated group mom for my dance classes' costumes, Dad went back to school for his MBA, Mom became one of our Girl Scout troop leaders, I went to middle school, Dad got more responsibilities at work, Mom went back to work part-time, I went to high school, Mom went back to work full-time... and I gradually helped out more and more at home. These were jobs, and it felt right to take pride in them as part of our family.
It felt so very important to make a contribution to the family... and so when I was really little and full of energy, Mom put me to work dusting the turned spindles of our dining room set and the end tables in the family room, setting the table for dinner, sitting with her helping fold laundry and putting it away. Lemon Pledge is forever connected with joyful working feelings in my scent-memory. I got to help bake bread (punching down the dough was so cool!), make granola, stir dough and cut out cookies. The smell of baking is also intricately linked with happiness for me.
I'd help Dad any way he'd let me in the garage, handing him tools while he fixed the cars or did woodworking. He and Mom refinished furniture, painted and varnished unfinished pieces, and he built shelves and birdhouses, and I got to help. The scents of sawdust and various varnishes and wood stains are comfort smells for me.
As I got older and headed off to school, that was my primary "job". I was also in charge of taking things that accumulated at the top of the stairs downstairs to put them away, and taking things that accumulated at the bottom of the stairs upstairs to put them away. I used 409 cleaner on the switch plates and the bits of the stairwell wall that got grey handprints once a year, that was part of spring cleaning. When Mom got busy and Dad had work stuff spread out all over to finish it on weekends, I took charge of laundry. I never turned anything pink, either!
The only chore that I didn't like was one Mom and Dad really wanted me to do on a regular basis: taking out the kitchen garbage. Blech. And yes, I memorized Shel Silverstein's poem, Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, Who Would Not Take The Garbage Out.
I used to love being home by myself for a bit, or when Mom and Dad were busy with other things enough not to notice what I was up to. I'd scamper around cleaning things and putting stuff away and when they'd come back, we'd all joke that Tilly, our ficticious and very efficient maid, had come and set everything to rights.
I loved helping Mom and Dad out in the yard, too. Planting the garden in the spring, weeding in summer (that was the least fun), harvesting things as they ripened, helping with canning and jam and jelly making, helping ready the garden for the winter when the first frosts came. When I got strong enough to push the lawnmower around, I'd do the front yard while Dad did the edges and trimmed the shrubs, and then he'd do the back yard. I can still remember how exhausted and triumphant I felt when I did the entire yard myself for the very first time.
Our garden was wonderful. Fresh tomatoes all summer, both the big huge beefsteak-kind-of ones and little tiny cherry tomatoes... green peas right from the pod, gourds for Christmas ornament making, snow peas, pickles and fresh dill, asparagus, I think we even tried growing potatoes and carrots. I planted an herb garden one summer with two kinds of basil, chives, lemon balm and chamomile. The chamomile was so successful that it seeded the entire yard and some of our neighbors'; we were still weeding chamomile out of the darnedst places three years later! We planted sunflowers, too, and corn one year. The birds and squirrels loved us in falland winter! Watching a squirrel hauling a full-sized ear of corn up into one of our big buckeye trees provided at least a half-hour's entertainment, if not more.
Mom had a large bed of tulips, daffodils and irises every spring. Almost all of the irises had pale blue uprights, and royal purple petals with golden yellow beards. I remember going out to the bed of a spring morning, Mom with her shears and me with a plastic bag and wet paper towels, so that I could take some to my teacher at school. Our steps made trails through the dew-covered grass around to the back yard bed, sparkling in the bright sunshine. I wish I had some photos of those irises... but my parents have new irises as well as tulips and daffodils at their current home.
I helped rake leaves every fall. We used them to mound over whatever the most tender plants happened to be any particular year, and at the base of the youngest trees, and Mom and Dad had one area behind the garden for composting for any extra that was left over.
Their backyard now isn't the same one I was a child in... we moved from the house we'd lived in since I was three the summer between middle school and high school. That's a whole 'nother story, actually. But I love their backyard. Dad loves botany and gardening, and though they don't do vegetables much any more, he's got all sorts of interesting plants and flowers growing.
The back porch is screened in, and Dad, with some help from Trent and I, built the brick wall that encloses Dad's cottage garden. Every year he puts out baskets of petunias that wave down over the wall. By the end of summer you can barely see the brick wall at all. The area behind the porch in this photo has a thicket sort of area with lilacs and flowers.
A few years back, I visited home for Irene's wedding. It was fall then, which has been rare time for me to visit since I moved to LA. The trees in my parents' backyard were all brilliant reds and crimsons and burgundies, and dumping leaves like mad. We raked leaves together for the first time in a decade. I really miss that feeling of teamwork with them... I think this is now my reminder to myself to go home to see them more often No Matter What.
And some time ago, my parents figured out that since they don't do as much gardening and composting as they used to, they could put their extra autumn leaves into these orange leaf bags that have jack-o-lantern faces printed on them. They leave them out in the front yard and the back yard as a fall display, and if the bags disappear, well, everyone is happy. One year all of their leaf bags mysteriously disappeared!
Fall is such a wonderful time. The air feels like promise and secrets, of all that has gone before and all that is yet to come.
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