Forest City Courier, June 23, 1938

Those Monday morning chores: The living room looks hopeless. Sunday newspapers scattered all over, book case in disarray. You can’t find your favorite magazine and when you do it is all full of square cut holes where someone has taken out a poem or advertisement. Part of that interesting story you were reading is gone too. As you straighten the window shades you spy the funnies, and sit down to look them over. For a few minutes you are engrossed in the adventures of little Orphan Annie, Maggie and Jiggs and the Katzenjammers. Remembering that sweeping and dusting is the important task of the morning, you pick up your broom and go on with your work, wondering at the adept way Orphan Annie handles every situation, feeling sorry for Jiggs and wishing you could give the Katzenjammer kids an added spanking. You go on to the bed rooms. They are even worse than the living room. Wearily you hang the Sunday clothes on hooks and put away the best shoes. Then there is the job of emptying the pockets of son’s overalls before they go in the wash. What a varied array of articles! Old chewing gum wrappers, marbles, a knife, rusty nails, arrowheads and ouch! You catch your finger on a fish hook. Your wrist watch tells you that it is only a few minutes till lunch time.

Where has the morning gone? After a hasty survey of the ice box you take out the meager remains of yesterday’s roast and a few left over vegetables. Hash seems the quickest solution, and being the typical Monday lunch you begin frantically to chip up onions. The front screen slams and you hear dad and son coming through the hall. Son has soiled face and hands, tousled hair, and apparently a big appetite as he sniffs the pan of hash. Later at the table as you watch him devour it with gusto, and listen to both of them comment on how clean and swell the house looks, you decide that “Blue Monday” is a misnomer.

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Have you ever worked in your flower garden at six o’clock on a June morning? Mine is a new small one, consisting mostly of annuals donated by kind neighbors. My zinnias and petunias grow in zig-zag rows. Weeds and grass vie with the struggling plants for supremacy, keeping me and my hoe busy. A garden is like a very wonderful school where all the instructors teach by silent but interesting object lessons, and where all the pupils “learn to do by doing.”Being such a little corner of the great outdoors, it permits a closer intimacy with Mother Nature than great woods and roiling stretches of country side can ever give. This little poem engraved on a bronze plate is found among the flowers growing near the Singing Tower at Mountain Lake, Fla.

 

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Everyone admires those Lombardy poplars growing on the edge of the lawn about that attractive brick bungalow at Sandy Mush. Each tree with its close, upward, turning branches looks like an exclamation point. Our encyclopedia tells us that this species of the poplar was originally imported to this country from Italy, but now has become thoroughly naturalized, and is quickly recognized by its perpendicular, distinctive manner of growth.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Courier. Copyright owned by The Daily Courier.