Monday, September 17, 2012

No, not a tombstone.......


In 1997 we had a huge windstorm and lost some large silver maple trees.  A walnut tree next door was lifted by it's roots and it lay on our lot.  My one old large silver maple lay on top of it from the opposite direction. I had two cars destroyed from that simple down draft as they wanted to call it.  It was a great mess and we spent days cutting and stacking wood thinking the town would come in to rescue us, taking it away.  Our neighboring town of Granger did that and helped the residence clean up in two days, hauling all of the limbs and debris away from the town and burning it.

Our town did not do that and we were left on our own to find various people to help with the removal.  Sometimes we were asked high prices to take away hayrack loads of limbs.  My neighbor Roy along with myself thought the town would rescue us so he brought this concrete base from his girls swingset over to the edge of my lot thinking the town was going to pick up the mess.
It is still sitting on my far northwest corner of my lot.

The girls have grown up now with Kathy who still lives next door having three girls of her own.  The youngest girls, twins, are in the third grade. Bernadine is the top girl's name and as you can see she ran out of room for her name. Bernadine was the older sister and she lives with her grandmother on the other end of town.  Roy who deposited the gravestone piece is now gone from Parkinson's disease.

I  have never addressed this concrete marvel and I don't think I want to try breaking it up into pieces. I should have done that when I was younger 10 years ago.



I seem to be growing my own birdseed.  It started to grow and I left it to see what kind of plant that it was.  I believe it will be millet.  The plant itself reminded me of a small corn plant.  I have a couple of these and I have left them to mature.



I give you a final finish with the last of the zinnias.  I will collect seed soon as the blooms are all becoming spent.

Thanks for stopping by my post today.

4 comments:

Far Side of Fifty said...

Interesting piece of neighborhood trivia..the Zinnias look great in the sunshine:)

A Brit in Tennessee said...

Maybe you could offer it back to the girls, as a piece of nostalgia ?
We have recently undergone the loss of two twenty five year old Maple trees, if it were the wind, I would be more forgiving, sadly it was the electric company, doing their six-year line-clean up :(
Love those Zinnias !
~Jo

Anonymous said...

Odd how you ended up with the chunk of concrete. We had a concrete birdbath that was so very heavy. We gladly left it for the folks who bought our last house!
Hope you'll get lots of zinnia seeds.

Debbie Lo said...

I wouldn't have broken up that piece of cement either. Heck, it's an actual piece of history now!

I had no idea you could grow birdseed into an actual plant. So that's what millet looks like!