Picked up a book the other day and noticed an envelope that had been used as a bookmark. It was a note from my nephew Dennis (although I suspect his wife, Gerry, had written it). It concerned an old acquaintance (by long distance) of a writer for the New York Times. His name was Verlyn Klinkenborn, a very impressive name. I told Dennis it almost seemed as though there should have been a "Van" in there. His home is in the middle west somewhere and he was complaining of the amount of rain we'd had that summer. It seems he has an upper and a lower garden which he'd managed to get planted and then the rain had taken over. He mentions what a well-kept garden, in a normal year, would be offering and then enumerates the crop of weeds, some of which I'm not familiar with. He said he had come up with a solution though, he would move the pig house into the lower garden and let the boys take over and do what they do best.

 When he mentioned the boys, it reminded me of one of Bob's stories of a man that had lived in the city and had bought an old farm that no one had lived on for some years. It contained an old neglected apple orchard which still bore a crop of wizened fruit. Bob said it had been four years since the man had moved into the country and as they were catching up on happenings of the past time, a monstrous hog came nosing and snuffling along and acted as though he wanted to be included in the conversation. The man asked the former city man what that was and he answered "When some of the neighbors first came to visit and they saw all these little apples on the ground, they said I ought to keep a pig, so I kept him."

 Some things are so much different now than they were years ago. It used to be, when a person or a new family moved into a neighborhood, it seemed almost a duty for the people living nearby to call and get acquainted. Of course this could have been idle curiosity, they wanted to see what kind of stuff the new folks had. 

 Speaking of year ago makes me think of the pond on the farm where we lived when we were little kids. Near the dam in the end of the pond there must have been a residence at one time for right in the trees there was part of the frameworks of an old house and still growing there was a rose bush. It must have been what some people called a cabbage rose for I never saw one that big anywheres else. It was huge. Almost as big as a small cabbage. 

 Another thing I remember seeing back then and never saw anywheres else was that the lumbermen called a lazyboy. This was a piece of steel fastened to the bottom log on a wagonload of logs. It was sharpened at the top and the bottom end dragged on the ground. This end had two points and was meant to dig into the road when a team stopped when pulling a load of logs uphill. It was held in place by a strap and there was another strap to hold the bottom end of the lazyboy up off the ground if they had a long way to go.