The Back Yard

My best friend... my worst enemy... the only child I had for a playmate within 3 miles of our house was my younger sister, Linda.

We sit here on the back steps of our house in rural eastern Arkansas.



Our cold-natured mother was very strict about our outdoor attire. If the temperature was below 70 degrees, she would see to it that our sweaters or jackets were buttoned, and that our scarves or hats were securely in place. We didn't have to worry about gloves or mittens unless the temperature plummeted below 50 degrees. If it was cold enough outside to warrant heavy coats and mittens, it was cold enough to limit outdoor playtime to 30 minutes or so, lest we suffer from frostbite. Okay, maybe it wasn't that extreme, but it certainly seemed so to a three-year-old.

Out this door and into our back yard and we were in the midst of the only playground we ever needed. This was our social setting, where we played chase, tag, and hide-n-seek with our visiting guests, had Easter Egg hunts and posed for Easter photos, held pretend circuses with our dog playing the part of all the circus animals, and where we attempted on numerous occasions to raise rabbits.  Between the time when I grabbed a small snake as I was gathering clover for the rabbits to eat, and the time when we went out to feed them breakfast only to find that they, themselves, had been breakfast to some manner of wildlife... well, I prefer not to dwell on the rabbits.

And then there were my birthday parties.  My maternal grandmother, whom we simply called Grandmother, made the majority of my birthday cakes.  She was not a baker, by trade, but a dancer.  She taught dance classes for toddlers through high school seniors.  Here, for my third birthday, she made two cakes.  The one on the right was her interpretation of a carousel.  Others she made for me included a barbie doll cake, in which a Barbie was interted into the top of a dome-shaped cake that served as the skirt of her "princess dress."  That cake made such an impression on me that I tried to replicate two of them... one for each of my twin granddaughters for their fourth birthday.  Another cake she baked for one of my birthday parties was a "swimming pool" cake... a sheet cake with a small tray filled with water in the center.  The top was made to look like sand and there were tiny swimsuit-clad figures scattered all across my confectionary beach.  She must have been the forerunner of The Ace of Cakes.


At least my birthday parties were held in our back yard. Having an August birthday allowed for al fresco entertaining. Linda's November birthday, on the other hand, usually made it necessary to move the party setting to the musty-smelling metal building that the Lions Club used for their meetings and for bingo.  A memory of one of those bingo games is branded into Linda's memory.  Under the careful guidance of Daddy, Linda was the one to "Bingo" during the very last game played.  One of the Lions Club members thought it would be funny to give an empty paper bag as the "prize" after all other prizes had been won.  Of course, they had no idea that a 4-year-old child would be the winner.  I don't think Linda has ever forgiven the Lions Club International as a whole for that prank.

There was our sandbox, where we made pies of sand, mud, and maybe something left over from some visiting cat.

We had a swingset, complete with slide and teeter-totter that also served as our make-believe horse... at least for a few years, until Daddy got us our first pony.

In the summertime, or pretty much anytime the weather was sunny and breezy, you would see the laundry hung out to dry on the clothesline in our back yard.  I remember the wonderful, fresh smell our sheets would have after they had been dried in the sun.  Those memories were much more pleasant than the memories of the scratchy, rough feel of the bath towels that Mother dried in the same manner.  And there were always rows and rows of daddy's jeans hung on metal stretcher frames that looked something like ancient torture devices.  Those stretcher frames put a crease in Daddy's jeans stiff enough to still be sharply in place at the end of his long day of farming or horse-training.

Although there are fondly-remembered stories from all other areas of our yard and our home, the back yard memories are some of the most varied and the most fun.  In future posts I will share many more photos and memories of this back yard and other places that I remember from my Payne-ful childhood.