On BACKYARD

March 18th

On BACKYARD

In 1989, when I was nine years old, my family moved from the house where I had lived since I was one to another house a kilometer away. My old house, 1013 Vanier Drive, was closer to the highway, and had a great backyard. There was a big hill with a tree at the top, and the tree was divided between us and our backdoor neighbours. My sisters and I used to roll down this hill a lot – I remember drawing a picture of rolling down the hill in Grade One. I drew myself rolling down the hill from a side perspective, as three concentric circles: a small blond one representing my head, a larger red one representing a red shirt, and then the largest blue circle representing my pants. It almost makes sense if you see it, and I think really captures the whirlwind feeling of tumbling down a hillside.
The best part about the backyard, though, was the sandbox. I really loved my sandbox. Sometimes I would break through the plastic on the bottom of the sandbox to the soil below, and eventually worms would come up through the bottom and interact with our sandscapes. One time we had a whole nest of worms in our sandbox. It was super gross, but it lent an element of danger to the sandbox experience.
We moved to 1423 Tecumseh Park Drive. I wasn’t happy about the move because the new backyard did not have a sandbox. My mom likes to tell the story of how upset I was about the lack of sandbox at the new house. It had a big stepped garden, two levels of soil held up by railway ties. No hill to roll down, no sandbox. But, there were lots of places to get lost, and our dog, Crackers, used to have a good time running around the different levels. I used to spend hours in the winter trying to get my mittens back from Crackers as he would race back and forth on the different levels of our backyard. In the first summer in the new house, I spent hours in the yard recreating the 1989 American League Championship Series with a baseball bat and a tennis ball.
Krista and I are thinking of buying a house in the next year or so. I really haven’t concerned myslf with the backyards of all the places I’ve rented in the last nine years, but if I own a house, I’m gonna have to mow the lawn, and maybe someday have kids that will play in that yard, a yard which will be sort of an arbitrary decision on our part, but if we have a kid, it’s gonna be that kid’s whole world. Maybe I will make a sandbox, and look for a backyard with a hill. It makes me wonder what my parents thought when they had me and my sisters, and if they knew what it was going to be like, and whether they felt like they were prepared.