THE BACK YARDS OF LANCASTER COUNTY
Paradise, I was told growing up in the middle of the twentieth century, was right there where we lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – the richest farmland on the face of the earth. My folks even owned a long narrow piece of it.
We called it the back yard.
Lancastrians loved their back yards in my boyhood after World War Two. Peace lay there and infinite ease. If the world out front on the street was stiffly formal, forever surveyed and found wanting by the neighborhood’s ruling grande dames on their elevated porches – out back was sweet liberty. Dad could strip down to his sleeveless undershirt to spade the garden, Mom could display her frilliest lingerie on the clothesline strung down the brick back walk to the garage, and we kids had the best deal of all.
Free-range, we roamed.
As toddlers newly sprung from the playpen, we discovered grass, weeds, petunias, you name it – all of which we instantly stuffed in our mouths. Lancaster County’s dark chocolate earth was irresistible. We took long luxurious baths in its mud puddles.
Quickly we learned to scamper screaming from bees. Roving dogs and cats we avoided as well. But how we loved the busy little ants – particularly to stomp on.
A little older, we lay on our backs and looked up at the billowing sky to find angels in the clouds or maybe God – or at least Grandpa. And if a Piper Cub ever flew over – planes were a rare occurrence in those initial postwar years – up and down the block everyone banged out the back door and cheered.
Some back yards ranged bigger than others and allowed for trees and a garden but even if they accommodated little more than two comfortable chairs and a table for the lemonade, it was where our neighborhood lived -- and we children played – pretty much all year round.
And all day long in summer.
Off from school, in our childhood’s prime, the back yards were where we accomplished most of our growing up in Lancaster Pennsylvania between the ages of two and sixteen. Few parents in our neighborhood could afford camp for their kids. Few took their families off for long vacations, unless it was a week at The Shore or a short stay with Grandma over in the next county.
Back home, we made our own camp and traveled far and wide. Yards on both sides of the alley welcomed us in.. One offered endless crocquet. Another, endless Monopoly. Another’s mom made Kool-Aid pops in her ice trays with toothpicks for sticks.
News got around. The neighborhood’s favorite babysitter was holding her own Vacation Bible class, but you had to bring a dime for the offering. A better deal was the yard six doors down where a loving father had just sprung for a lawn sprinkler.
We all had a comical sidekick or two we ventured out with. Every day was different except for our frequent stops at Yarnall’s corner store for comics and Milky Ways and Fudgsicles.
When our buddy’s family hauled him off for a week to Wildwood or Rehoboth or Ocean City, we made do – sometimes even with a girl, especially if she was cute and funny and had a ten-inch TV in her living room. On hot afternoons you’d sit in there sucking the lady’s Kool-Aid pops and watching the TV test pattern until WGAL brought on the laff-riot 3 PM start to their daily line-up – tennis.
Say what?
None of us knew much about tennis. We played our share of back alley baseball, but our best games were the ones we made up ourselves. They took balls, too, of course, but we also made use of orange crates, puppets, cardboard boxes, loose boards, rusty lead pipes, Slinkys, chicken wire, pick-up-sticks and Play-Doh.
The noisiest diversion required five red rolls of caps made for our Hubley Trigger Jr cowboy guns.. One summer some Howdy Doody Einstein discovered you could make one heck of a bang if you exploded five rolls at once by pounding them flat with a brick.
Remember how a brick and caps could split the summer air? A soundtrack of Lancaster Pennsylvania’s back yards in my boyhood would go: “Clink, clink BAM. Clink, clink, clink BAM.”
The old folks hated it. “Go, climb a tree!” a geezer yelled at me once.
Lucky, those kids with a tree in their yards. It was usually a maple. We kept jumping up for the lowest branch until one day we were big enough to slap it, then grip it, then swing back and forth on it, until we grew some more and the tree grew some more, and we finally could hoist ourselves up and find the right branch to read books on.
Tree hideaways were also useful for spying on the neighbors. You heard things. Saw things -- like the German war bride gathering roses in her underwear. One day I caught the old man next door taking a leak on his wife’s waxed begonias.
Every Friday afternoon, while moms sliced lemons for the lemonade, we sons would be called on to mow the grass. Cousins would be coming Sunday afternoon.
Dad and the uncles would sit and smoke White Owls or Phillies cigars, while the aunts and Nana toured the petunias and marigolds and – this being Lancaster – brave little bushes of red roses from Root’s.
Vegetable gardens got appraised by the visitors for the size and perfection of their produce. Everyone had Bibb lettuce, radishes, carrots, tomatoes.
Some even tried corn, beans and squash – which happen to be the very same vittles grown by Nanticoke Indians on this very same hillside three hundred years before us. Up on their annual trek from the Chesapeake Bay to summer by the Conestoga, they may very well have planted their gardens in our very own back yard.
At least that’s what the neighborhood wino told us once.
No one grew lemons in our Sixth Ward, but the lemonade flowed. And stories. And laughter.
Laughter in the air was constant from the neighborhood’s children. Shouts and ear-splitting screams, as well.
Ken Kreider on the radio could be heard every morning. The Phillies at night. Afternoons: some kid practicing his trumpet.
And anytime, night or day: “...clink, clink, BAM.”
“Cut that out, punk.”
All summer long, neighbor boys and girls played side by side and never noticed what the other gender was up to. None of us guys ever jumped rope while singing about love and marriage and the baby carriage.
Nor could we have told you how the jacks deal worked – or the hopscotch thing. But one year, one sunny day, we would look up from our Hardy Boys and discover Nancy Drew had grown very long legs and was wearing some very short shorts.
Often in the hour of dwindling light after dinner, the kid next door and I pitched a ball over the wire fence between our yards. But on the night we slept out in my brand-new pup tent from the Army and Navy Store at the corner of West King and Prince, the adventure stopped abruptly when we found ourselves terrifyingly attacked.
You might be thinking Russians. Or mosquitos.. It was far worse.
I tore up the walk and into the house – the neighbor kid right behind me – after we heard from behind the hedge the blood-curdling owl hoots – “Whoo… Whoo” – of a stealthily approaching blood-thirsty Nanticoke.
He was undoubtedly one of our Dads.
Or maybe the wino.
Lessons like that one were legion in Lancaster back yard summers. We profited bigtime from the freedom to roll round our open range without fear and in total safety – and pretty much unsupervised.
The facts of life were not taught us. We hit upon them by pluck or luck.
Always on the look-out, sooner or later, we all found untold riches right there in our own back yard. Alone one day – my friend off in Wildwood, me disconsolately scratching away at our family’s patch of the best soil on earth – suddenly I uncovered a gold mine.
One shining nugget. Then another. Then an older boy ambled into the yard and quickly pricked my bubble. “Monkey gold,” he sniffed. “Worthless. Look what I found.”
He opened the lid on the box he was carrying and there was the beast I eventually came to think of as The Sixth World Turtle. A venerable antique, a relic of the last Ice Age – or at least an auld acquaintance of the Nanticokes – that grinnng beastie had it made.
For a week, he’d be doted on, fed grass and pretzels – and Dad’s Bibb lettuce from the kitchen garden – until early one morning Mom would gently tip the creature back into the wild where he was sure to be captured again, three doors down, by yet another child entrepreneur dreaming he might rival the Philadelphia Zoo or Ringling Brothers.
If only he and the turtle could capture that squirrel.
At least once between the ages of five and seven, most of us fell into another very special back yard lesson in wildlife. The game was called Doctor – and some of us never forgot it.
In my case, the girl suggested it. No doctor’s kit was involved, and it was over so quickly it barely registered. Behind our hedge, in front of the shed where my father raised chickens during The War, hard-breathing Barbara tossed her golden braid, flashed her little secret, ran off, and left a budding doctor literally with his pants down.
We all had one -- a back yard, that is. Maybe yours was not like mine. But maybe a grandparent’s was in Columbia or Quarryville or Ephrata. Or a friend’s on the West Side of Lancaster.
In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, thousands of long narrow yards lay deep within our ancient city – walled-off, unseen behind the brick row houses. Slivers of paradise is how I think of them. Each one memorialized the generations of women, men, and children – from Nanticokes to Nana – who cherished that bit of earth.
Sister and I grew up in such a yard. Mother and Dad grew old there – father with his Phillies, Mom with her lemonade.
You hear folks speak of looking forward to heaven.
Aren’t we equally blessed looking back to it?
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| A backyard in Lancaster County! |
