Backyard Enchantment

FROM WHERE I SIT Backyard Enchantment Pat DeKok Spilseth




When summer arrives in full bloom, there’s a special kind of enchantment. Summer breezes smell extra fine. Grass feels softer. Waves gently lick the shore. Hammocks swing slowly between backyard trees, and we fall into a deep sleep.



Remember when your mom told you to go out and play? You did. Kids got up a backyard ball game and played ante ante over the shed storing rakes and mowers, winter skis, skates and toboggans. Little tykes blew bubbles through the wire wand of the bubble bottle, chasing them in until they burst far up in the clouds. Some created plays on backyard stages. You stayed outside all day long until the supper whistle blew, then raced home to eat with the family at the kitchen table.



Do people still take time to enjoy relaxing in their backyards? I hope so, but with both Mom and Dad working; the kids in day care or school, and grandparents living many miles away...who uses their backyards anymore? Kids’ schedules are crammed with supervised lessons in every sport, music and language. Do children today have free time to play? Is the backyard another sign of oblivion like the front porch?



When I was a kid, we used to play dress up with neighbors’ cast off hats, trailing bridal veils, and bridesmaids’ bouffant, pastel dresses. We paraded with measured steps, pretending to be part of a wedding party. Some backyards had a swing set and a slide. Jeanie Zimma’s grandparents had a play house in their yard for us to have tea parties and play with our dolls. My backyard had a sweeping, weeping willow tree where I would sit with my pals on a high branch, lean back against another branch, and swap tales. No parent or neighbor could see up through the leafy tendrils hanging to the ground. How cool the shade felt on hot summer days sitting in the tree sharing our dreams.



When Dad was sheriff, my backyard at our jail home was across the street from the red brick Lutheran church. Kids would gather before choir practice and confirmation classes to roll down our huge, grassy hill, squealing with delight. We’d pick dandelions and braid the yellow weeds into crowns. Lazy summer afternoons we’d stretch out on the sweet smelling grass and search for four leaf clovers to bring good luck. If we were lucky, we’d find one or two, press them into the thick Webster Dictionary, and save them in a special box. On the cement sidewalk, we’d draw hopscotch squares with chalk and jump from one block to the other, scattering those nasty, sandy ant hills with our white tennis shoes.



Mom’s laundry was hung on our backyard clothes lines on Monday, her designated wash day. Her clothes pin bucket was a tiny dress whose skirt held the wooden clothespins anchoring clothing to the lines strung between metal posts. White bed sheets flapped on the two outside lines; panties, slips and bras, BVD underwear, night gowns, and pajamas were hung on the inside line. No one was supposed to see these “unmentionables”.



We created a camp out tent by pinning Dad’s gray, wool, army blankets to the clothesline. Though we wanted to spend the night outdoors, often we got too scared or rambunctious in the tent telling ghost stories. The pins holding the tent would pop, and the blankets collapse on giggling girls underneath. When we remembered that the jail prisoners were only a few feet from our tent, it spooked us. Our imaginations, the starry black night, and those unidentifiable monster sounds frightened us so thoroughly by midnight that we’d abandon our tent and run to the safety of the back door.



Mom and her friends enjoyed coffee and cookies while they visited in the backyard’s metal lawn chairs, which could get blistering hot. The soft grass cooled our feet, especially after the Courthouse caretaker Herman Quist mowed the lawn, making the air sweetly scented with newly mown grass. His helper, friendly Lee Sorset, would often stop to visit with us until Herman appeared; then Lee tried to look busy once more.



Dad liked to relax with a cigarette in the evening. He sat in a lawn chair in the backyard watching the traffic on Minnewaska Avenue. He could see who was walking down the sidewalks towards downtown, veterans going in for a drink at the Legion Hall, someone being booked at the police station, and ambulances bringing bodies to Hoplin’s Funeral Home. We had quite the view!



Sitting in the backyard on Sunday mornings, we could see who was coming to church services at Glenwood Lutheran Church. Of course, we also noted who wasn’t coming to church. It was a thrill to watch brides in their veils and long white gowns, bridesmaids with their big skirts and bouquets, and the groomsmen in their black tuxedoes. Photographer Vernon Hegg would shoot pictures of the guests throwing rice at the bridal couple. I loved hearing the couple’s car with tin cans and noisemakers attached making a huge racket as they drove away for their honeymoon.



As a kid, possibilities seemed endless when it came to wasting away a summer day. Finding a soft patch of grass under a tree to lie on my back, I’d gaze dreamily into the floating clouds in the sky. English politician John Lubbock wrote, “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”



I love perfect summer days in my backyard, hearing neighbor’s grandkids laughing as they jump off the dock into the lake. Summer doesn’t last forever... Take time to dial back to those empty days of a simpler time. Give yourself the luxury of enjoying summer in your backyard. 991