becoming men

Dear Family,

Now that much of my day is spent digging ditches, pulling stubborn weeds, and trying to squeeze labor out of my young boys, I have a lot of time to think. As often is the case, I tend to have time warp come over me and I am carried back to 5 Lockhart Circle and I am about oh, 10 years old. I am holding one corner of a rediculously large tarp surrounded by Dad, Clark and the occasional guest appearance of a very young Bub who shows up mostly for comic releif.

It is a gorgeous October Saturday with an explosion of color and a chill in the air. My mind is running over the myriad of places I would rather be than doing any manual labor. The art of hauling large heavy loads of leaves down the driveway out to the front strip without spilling the contents is a lost art form.

As my mind zooms to the present, I am suddenly aware that Ethan can't be seen or heard. He is no dummy and a clone of me at his age. He has wisely ducked down into a ditch where he can't be seen or heard and is silently sqeezing dirt together into one fantastic mudball. I ask him to pull a few weeds while he is contemplating the nature of mud and he humors me by pulling oh 5 weeds and ducks back down into his ditch. I let out a mighty sigh and focus on Ben. We are sweating freely now that it is 10 am and we are stringing up the tomatoes. Ben peppers me with a barage of philisophic questions regarding good and evil, the quality and speed possessed of various brands of scooters and my take on how Star Wars characters evolved. I can't recall ever having these types of conversations with my siblings or dad. I do remember trying to convince dad that leaves tend to keep falling to the ground and that instead of using every Saturday during the fall to collect the leaves, we should only spend one.

I have also contemplated the nature of strength as it relates to fathers and sons. I knew dad was tougher than me when I watched him reach bare handed into the kitchen sink and pull out the dinner dandruf. That was something I wasn't capable of. I told my boys that I would pay them $20 the day they could out-work me. There was a glimmer in their eyes for a moment and then when we started to work again the glimmer soon faded.

Well enough for now. Our tomatoes are starting to turn and hopefully in a week or so I will have them coming out of my ears. Right now my anger has been kindled by the gang of pheasants that have laid to waste many of my ripe and even my unripe tomatoes. I am currently working out a plan with the division of wildlife resources for compensation.

Laird