Four brightly-painted wooden mallets could send four matching wooden balls sailing across our expansive and bumpy yard at over 100 miles per hour and if you took the game seriously, which my four siblings and I did, someone of us would interrupt each and every game by loudly howling a complaint after an egregious foul or near-death experience, then rush inside the house to find a parent or other suitable referee.
["This shot is going out of the pond and over the barn!"]
Mom or Dad would often simply yell at us through a screen window or, if someone had been banged on the head, admonish those at fault (Who? Me?) from the back porch.
Tensions would settle down for a few seconds until, for example, I made contact with my younger brother’s ball - even though I didn’t need to in order to stay ahead or win.
I would carefully line up his ball and whack it so hard it would sail into the chicken coop or right through our thick hedge and over the road and into Mrs. Kelly’s flower bed.
The poor lad got so angry one day he screamed and chased me into the house with his mallet. Thank goodness a referee was on hand just inside the back door.
I think I can safely say, because of our competitive spirit, if we had been given lacrosse sticks to play with there would not be a family member alive today.
But my siblings and I are alive, and I’m happy for it, and our wide yard was also the scene of many happy memories, most of which took place without a mallet in our hands.
We had ample room for swings, lawn chairs, picnic tables, bikes, trikes, gardens, chickens, dogs, massive shade trees and games of catch. Even room to practice my wedge and chips shots after I bought my first set of golf clubs. (No deaths occurred.)
We had one of the few in-town barns, and though dad used it mainly as car park, chicken coop and storage area, it offered many more exciting opportunities for play when he was at work.
[Watercolour of the barn by our mother, Edith J. Harrison]
I practiced my wrist shot for hockey against an inside wall. I improved my throwing arm by hurling hundreds of pitches toward a target that I’d chiseled on an outside wall. I chipped golf balls over the roof.
As well, I shot marbles through the windows and doors with my slingshot, swung on a rope tied to a rafter, carved my initials on a few boards and kissed a girl after the two of us had climbed into the loft.
The barn was torn down a few years ago and according to prearranged plan, the new owner called me so I could rescue some of the lumber for shelves and bird boxes before it all went to the scrap heap.
[The earliest set of initials, A.C.b. from 1877]
I scavenged rare, very wide pieces of lumber that were at least 140 years old and lovely, narrower boards on which were carved the initials of several of our seven family members.
Not surprisingly, the well-used but ever-dangerous croquet mallets were long gone.
[Read more Monday Memoirs by Gord Harrison at It Strikes Me Funny]
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