When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #15

Story #15 Chores – The paper bag and the tumbleweed

I mentioned in story #14 about having to do chores. I hated chores! My brothers were not too thrilled about them either. I’m sure you’ve heard your parents tell you that chores teach you responsibility. I heard that too. I also told that to my kids. It does teach you responsibility. It also teaches you about teamwork and working together.

My older brothers had to mow the grass and all of us had to ‘pull weeds’. Yuck! My mom would pass out a paper bag and we had to fill that paper bag with weeds. Then she would look to see what kind of a job we did and if we did a good job, ‘we were done!’ If we didn’t do a good job, we worked longer and she saw to it that we did a better job! We had this one weed called ‘goat heads’ and they were thorny little buggers. They spread out across the ground and then they would bloom pretty little yellow flowers and those flowers turned into a little flattened thorns. They hurt like the dickens if you stepped bare foot onto them. If they were dried thorns, they stuck into your feet and you would have to pull them out. Ouch! It was dry where we lived, and when it rained, the weeds grew like mad! These were mostly the weeds we had to pull one particular day.

In the summer, we usually started out early in the mornings around 8:00a.m. to do our chores because it got too hot by 11:00a.m. and then you pretty much stayed in the shade, if you could find some, or stayed indoors. My twin brother Gayle got done awfully fast and I was still working on filling my paper bag. Our bags would hold about one gallon of weeds. He didn’t like pulling weeds any better than I did. I couldn’t imagine how he could get done so fast. He sat in the cool shade while I worked. My mom came out to check on us and asked Gayle why he was sitting there not working while the rest of us were. He told her that he finished! She told him to bring his bag to her and let her see. Sure enough there were weeds and it felt a little heavy. So she poured out the bag and what do you suppose she found? A tumbleweed with a few rocks on the bottom of the bag and a few weeds on the top and the tumbleweed was in the middle. How very clever! Only mom didn’t think that was very clever at all. She made him pick ‘two bags’ of weeds for being dishonest and lying to her! Gayle could be sly and sneaky only this time it got him in trouble! I didn’t share his same talent. It never occurred to me that you could cheat when doing chores! Gayle wasn’t too happy about getting into trouble and picking twice the amount and he didn’t get done as quick this time. I was just glad I didn’t do that and I hurried and got my bag filled and sat in the shade and watched him!