laurie-Old House

For some reason I always considered our "Old House" a farm. I don't remember many animals besides some chickens, but I do remember some lovely ponds filled with tadpoles. That made it farm enough for me. I use to grab my mothers jars and go "fishing" in those pools and bring home some freshly caught fish. I remember being horribly upset when my mother made me go and throw those fish back out in the pond.
Other parts of that "Farm" that stand out to me was a big Burr tree in our front yard. It was a tree I ALWAYS wanted to climb, but never seemed to get an opportunity. It seemed everytime I tried I would get burrs tossed down on me and I would have to go run for cover in the long grass next to our house. I called it the sticky grass because it was sharp. It would cut you up pretty bad so running into that grass meant that the burr wars were pretty deadly. I was only three or four so I didn't have a lot of common sense because I kept coming back for more, and just like clockwork my older brother and sister would pelt me with those burrs until I would again turn tail screaming into the sharp grass. Yet as always I would try again. You would think that that would make trusting them that much harder, but growing up I was always a little naive. If they spent time with me I wanted to please them, and so they got away with murder.
When I was four we moved. One afternoon mom and dad left Joel and Meg in charge and a dog across the street had scattered our trash all over the yard. Because our family was so large, you could usually count on some dirty diapers being spread around, and so everyone would try to clean up everything else as quickly as they could, but leave one unlucky person the nasty diapers to clean up. Well one day my older Brother and Sister decided it was Davids turn to clean up the poop. David being a little quicker then I was adamantly refused to do so. They kept pressuring him (Because I imagine they didn't want to pick up the poop either) until they came up with this idea :Lets have everyone else touch the poop to show David it's not that big a deal. Well like idiots we did. We all stuck our fingers in the dirty diaper and slowly cleaned up the mess to prove we were not babies about cleaning up the poop, All the while not realizing that Joel and Meg never touched anything. But they did cheer us on from the sidelines. I don't know if David was ever convinced, but the mess did get cleaned up.