By writing this story, I’m breaking a sixty-year-old promise made to my mom and dad to never use four-letter words. Sixty years is a long time to keep a promise so why break it now? Well, Dear Reader, there is a very good reason or, I should say, a bunch of little ones. And when you get to the end of this story, I think you’ll agree.
During this time of year, they fall from the sky and land everywhere. My backyard, once covered with a blanket of soft green fescue grass, is now blanketed with brown, golf ball-sized, prickly, sweetgum balls. The joy of running barefooted through our grassy backyard is no more. Now it’s been replaced by the drudgery of continually raking those cursed little spiky things.
Now I know the balls are seed pods for new sweet gum trees, but why do they have to be so spiky and difficult to clean up? Even squirrels won’t touch them, and they eat just about anything. I have only one of these trees in my backyard, and that is too many. (Even cutting it down would be difficult. Splitting the wood of a sweetgum tree is almost impossible.) In all my time here on this blue spinning ball, I know of only two uses for those spiky balls. But for those, we need to travel back a long, long time ago to that old familiar street not so far away called Flamingo.
It was Big Brother James who came up with the perfect solution of what to do with all the sweetgum balls, but his discovery was purely by accident. Our backyard sloped down from the house and ended at the leading edge of a swamp. The yard on an incline made it easy to rake leaves into piles at the bottom.
Unfortunately, in the spring, leaves didn’t cover our backyard. Sweetgum balls did, and that kind of raking was anything but easy. Those spiky things dug into the grass and were just about impossible to move down into a pile. After we four boys spent most of Saturday morning raking with not much to show for it, James got the idea to use thick gloves and pick up those balls by hand instead.
His idea worked great until I got mad at Older Brother Richard, picked up a sweetgum ball and threw it in his direction. It hit him in the forehead and left a little red mark. In my defense, I was aiming for his chest. And had I known that it was to be the first volley in the great sweetgum war of ’65, I would’ve thought twice about that lob. Suddenly we lost all interest in the task Dad had given us, and soon sweetgum balls were flying all over our backyard. Trust me. Getting hit in the arm or leg by one of those spiky balls from hell (that’s one of those four-letter words I was talking about earlier) really hurt. Even our t-shirts offered little or no protection.
The first, and last, Sweetgum war lasted about an hour, then it was time for lunch. Covered with throbbing little red marks, we all sat around the lunch table eating in silence. Dad walked in, took one look at us, smiled, and said, “See y’all found a use for those prickly balls. Just make sure they all get down to the bottom of the hill by dinner time.” He turned to walk away and threw a cautionary statement over his shoulder, “Stop throwing those things at each other. Don’t want to lose an eye.”
We did what he said. We stopped throwing them at each other and eventually got them all down at the bottom of the hill, but how we did wasn’t the way he thought we would. For the rest of the afternoon, we stood in our backyard and, using our slingshots, launched all those pesky, spiky sweetgum balls into the swamp. For the next seven years, that’s how we cleared the backyard. (Okay. A few of those sweetgum balls did find targets other than the swamp, but that’s a Down the Street Bully Brad story for another time.)
This brings us to my most recent encounter with those spiky things from my childhood past. Last week’s storm brought thunder, lightning, high winds and something else: a loud tapping sound on our back windows. At our house, the storm started around 10:00pm and lasted well past midnight, and The Wife and I were awake for all of it. During that time, we heard loud tapping sounds against the house and windowpanes. We first thought it was small sticks being picked up by high winds and hitting the house, then I realized.
“It’s those sweetgum balls.”
We lost power around 1:00am, and when the wind subsided an hour later, I stepped out onto our back deck with a high-powered flood light to survey any damage to our vinyl siding caused by the bombardment. That’s when my bare feet found that our entire deck was covered with spiky sweetgum balls.
At that point, I said almost all the four-letter words I know.
Sorry, Mom and Dad.
