Why do I enjoy gardening, both “accidental” and deliberate, so much?
A little background, if you please . . .
My Dad was a cowboy; a real cowboy. I remember living on a ranch in the Texas panhandle when I was very young. Dad would come home after several days riding the fence lines, bone tired, smelling of sweat and leather, with a big smile on his face. He loved being a cowboy. He made pretty good money, for a cowboy, about fifty dollars a month, which included some extra pay for “breaking” horses. “Breaking”, for those not familiar with Texas ranch lingo, means taming horses and training them to be “cow ponies”. That’s part of what dad did for a living, not for show in a rodeo. And, he did it all alone, except for my dog, Pal, and I, who were devoted “fans”. I don’t recall mom ever watching dad work the ponies. She didn’t seem to enjoy the ranch life as much as dad, Pal, and I.
Pal and I sort of took care of each other. Pal, of course, did most of the taking care, and I just went along for the fun. I also had a horse. When I started to school, I would ride my horse, Baldy, about a mile to a dirt road where the school bus would pick me up and take me to school. In the afternoon, the school bus would deposit me at the same spot, and I would ride Baldy back to the house. Did Baldy stay there at the gate all day? I don’t think so, but he was always there when I got off the bus in the afternoon. That’s the way things were, and I never questioned it. I suspect Mom and/or Dad had something to do with Baldy being there to greet me after school.
That’s about all I remember of ranch life. Oh, there are a few other snippets of memory that come to mind once in a while, but not a lot of detail. My brain, having spent several decades remembering and forgetting, seems to have become best at forgetting.
When WW II came along, Dad moved us from our small home out in the “middle of nowhere” to Quitaque, Texas. I’m not sure what Dad did for a paycheck in Quitaque, but I think he worked at a lumberyard. I remember playing in the stacks of lumber with my cousin, Carl. Betty, Carl’s little sister, came along once in a while, but since she was a girl, Carl and I considered her a pest and avoided her whenever possible. She always brought her doll, and dolls simply don’t belong in lumberyards.
After several months in Quitaque, we moved to an old house at an abandoned gravel pit a few miles south of town. I suspect the rent was cheaper there, or, maybe it was free. Dad spent a lot of time doing repairs and building cabinets in the kitchen. In any event, while at the gravel pit, I led an idyllic boyhood: catching bugs, tarantulas, minnows, and learning to swim & catch fish. There was a year-round stream running near the house, and a water reservoir with a rickety old wooden pier leading out to a pump house in the middle of the reservoir. The reservoir was just a small pond, but it seemed large to me. I spent countless hours in and around the pond. I recall a large catfish that would sun himself (herself?) on the sandy bottom of the shallows where the stream fed into the pond. My greatest ambition was to catch that catfish and have it for dinner. Alas, the catfish was much more clever than I, and I never caught it. I did, however, catch some of its smaller cousins using grasshoppers and minnows for bait. I used a hand line and rusty old hooks that I found in the tool shed. It wasn’t a very fancy fishing rig, but it did the job while fishing off the pier or through a hole in the floor of the pump house. I was forbidden to go into the pump house because it was dangerously close to collapsing, but that made it all the more attractive.
The time we spent living at the gravel pit was, fairly short; about a year, or so. This relatively short time, however defines the best of my childhood memories. Eventually, Dad purchased a house in Quitaque, and we moved back into town. I recall Dad discussing the finances with Mom. It seems Dad didn’t have the cash to pay for the house (the price was four hundred dollars), and he was agonizing over having to borrow money. It was the first time he had ever been in debt, and he was very uncomfortable with the idea of being a debtor.
Cowboys don’t like to be owin’ to anybody.
World Was II brought good paying jobs to “big cities” like Amarillo, and we moved there so Dad could find work as a carpenter in the “war effort”.
That was the end of my carefree boyhood, and Dad didn’t smile much after we moved to the “big city”.
