What Happened (Part 24)

Mom is up and watching her program, and when it ends she announces she’s going out to get the mail, and who wants to go with her? Of course we all have to go.  The front door is open with the screen door locked, but with a click and a squawking of hinges we tumble out after her.  The front porch is a stage for its own variety of amusements: we can form a circular line of jumping off its precipitous one-foot height, climbing back up the stairs, and doing it again, or we can swing out on its pole over the abyss and back again, or it can be the venue for the Green Apple Talent Show. It is lit at night by a black stage-coach style lamp, and has a hook for a birdcage on its supporting pole.  There is a sidewalk looping squarely from the front porch to the back, a nice track for rides on the old red tricycle, and we follow it partway to the stony driveway.  Here the less hardy of us must pause under the shade of the front ash tree.  Let’s look around a bit while Mom goes to get the mail at the end of the driveway.

The front yard is a rather irregular rectangle thanks to the loop that gives Loop Drive its name.  Besides the ash tree there are two young pecan trees that right now aren’t producing pecans, but will in later years.  Close to the house there is rather lush and comfortable carpet grass, but towards the Road (as we call the street) there is an increasing instance of stickers, and at the sides of the property a propensity for milkweed. To the right as you face the street is a large field, split down the middle by a tall windbreak line of trees, full of Johnson grass that reaches over our heads and scattered with bull nettle.  Bull nettle is fascinatingly dangerous; its big white flowers, tri-horned buds, and bright orange sap that bleeds when you cut the stem, dare us to meddle with it despite the painful thin prickles that guard the plant. Sometimes in spring the field is full of deep, deep clover. In front, across the road, is the Coors household, an older couple in a fancier house with access to the river.  Pop knows Mr. Coors from when he was serving a stint at the Guadalupe Valley Electric Company.  Though nice people, they are periodic sources of irritation when they throw big parties and their guests park on “our side of the road”, gouging into the drainage ditch and leaving trash behind, and when the fall winds blow huge drifts of leaves from their sycamore trees into our yard.  To the left is a small green rental house, owned by Shadow, the proprietor of our neighborhood bar and grill.  The house is occupied by the Johnson family. Besides the rather sketchy father (whose name always escapes me, though John tells me it was Tommy; he was always at work), there was Kathy, the mother, who would come over for coffee and visits with Mom, her daughter Donna, just about my age, and their mostly white dog Loppy, named for his drooping ear.  They are always good for company and amusement, and it is with Donna that we play the Green Apple Talent Show, either on the front porch or in the bed of the old green pickup truck that sits beached in our driveway, mugging and miming our way through childish parodies of popular entertainment.

Mom comes back from the mailbox (it is bills or sales; very, very seldom letters) and she’s also picked up the paper from the end of the driveway (which sports a significant dip that after rain becomes a very interesting, rather large puddle to play with, but never in; mostly by sailing leaves).  We all troop back in, and Mom settles down to read the paper in the armchair in the living room.  We have a short period for a quick playing or two to kill time (and I fear I haven’t even now explained the true nature of a playing, but I will, before the chapter’s out) and then it’s time for the highlight of our day.