Flashback Friday

A view from the back porch.  Looking north.  Lots to see and remember.  First, the house on the left is the newly built and occupied Buster Board house.  Just above the windows are the new gutters that replaced the ones destroyed in an unfortunate explosion.  Old story always worth retelling:  Mike, Mark and Ivan placed cigarettes onto the fuses of 3 M-80's.  Light the cigarette and you have a three to five minute wait until the burning tobacco lights the fuse.  We placed them on top of the gutters before Buster moved in and we went to bed while Ivan waited up at the old school house.  A sweaty few minutes elapsed until they finally went off.  Herb jumped out of bed, checked on us, and said to Marj, "Thank God its not our boys."

The house on the right is the Frey place.  Evelyn and Newt lived there for years, and in fact, I ran away from home once and made it that far.  Evelyn took me in, made a call to Marj, and after some cookies, I was retrieved.  

The yard was half of our 2 lots that made for a perfect baseball or football playing field.  Long after we stopped playing you could still see a worn area that was home plate.  The great climbing tree is on the far right and is the spot where Bill Seaton would yell his "Skiboo" and "Bakee", whatever they meant.  We didn't care.  Equally amusing was when his mother would yell from  across the block for him to come home and he would yell "nooooo" in what seemed a very deep voice for a kid.

To the right of the tree was our sandpile, and Herb would eventually put a flagpole out there.  The Fall ritual of putting plastic on the porch so that it became an all weather room was a week-long project.  And not a one-man job so we got roped into it later on.     

Today the porch is screenless and more or less a carport-like area for storage.  Back in our time it was the hub for all things during summer vacations.  Herb would sit and listen to grain commodity programs at noon, Marj would sunbathe.  If anyone had news this was where it would be announced.  Comfy seating, a TV, and all the news of the day.

The hedges are gone, now, as is the Frey house.  They up and moved to Arizona.  Buster Board is gone, too, as is Bill.  The tree is still there but is clearly past its prime and on decline.   The summers of our youth.