The New Patio

We’d only been in the new house a few months, just long enough for me to explore all the drawers and figure out that if I pulled all the toys out of the special toy cabinet in the den, my brother and I would both fit in for a good astronaut adventure. At 5 and 12, we were both still skinny and flexible enough to fit, backs on the bottom and feet braced against the top, as if we were John Glenn himself, although I personally had a crush on Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper. 1962 had come and gone, and we’d listened to the recording of Mr. Glenn’s flight enough times that we could quote most of it, lying in the dark, dreaming of outer space. 

The summer of 1963 held a lot of excitement for all of us. I was about to start school, and had spent much of the summer frolicking around the new house behind my brother, much to his chagrin. We played WWII (for some reason, I was always the German POW, locked in a crate in the foxhole out back). I said my first cuss word, which got my brother into a lot of trouble (after I admitted I’d learned it from him). And we frequently left our bikes right in the middle of the carport. 

Exactly where Daddy wanted to park when he came home. 

So that summer, Daddy put his construction and carpentry skills into gear. Carpentry was his first love, and he worked with wood in his spare time almost till the day he died. He built a workshop in the backyard for toys and power tools and workbenches. And because we loved cookouts and Mother got tired of ants on the carport, he decided we needed a new patio. Six-year-old daughter notwithstanding. 

Or, rather, with standing daughter.

I loved that gravel pit he laid out. You see, he thought he’d brought in a load of gravel. I thought he’d delivered the riches of Solomon. Look! Sparkles! Oh, and that one has a white quartz in it! Can I have this one? Daddy often left his cowboy boots, which were usually covered in mud, on the carport. So I’d be running around barefoot, playing with the cats, when I’d spot a fancy rock. I’d grab his boots and put them on to go explore. Mother thought this was darling. Daddy thought he’d never get his patio poured. 

I grieved when the concrete did finally go down. He’d mixed it himself, in a portable mixer a neighbor loaned him. Daddy was big into bartering…he once traded a 1964 Impala for a new driveway.

For years, Mother tried to convince me to be more girly. One Christmas, they bought me a make-up vanity, the cardboard kind that has to be put together, slot A into crevice 18. They almost lost their minds assembling it. Mother almost lost her mind when she found that I’d filled the drawers with various rocks and bones I’d scoured from the local fields and woods. It’s a wonder I never became a geologist.

By the time I was 10, Mother had found the perfect distraction from the exploration of local flora, fauna, and minerals. She gave me a typewriter. Between it and my books, adventures were no longer limited to the backyard.

But I will still stop if I see a fascinating rock, and slip it into my pocket. Some things you just never grow out of.