I grew up in the fifties and our home was in Lewisville, North Carolina, just west of Winston-Salem. While we did not have a huge backyard, what we had served as a place for many great afternoon games for neighborhood friends when I was in elementary school. We played there until Boy Scouts took up almost all of my time and I eventually went off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
There was no backyard at military school just a drill field, where you got to walk laps on Saturday afternoon if you had not stayed close to the rules. Like regular high school, military school did not last forever so I headed off to college as soon as I graduated. There was also no backyard at college but I did manage to go cross-country skiing a few times on the Radcliffe Quad. The better news was that Maine and eventually Nova Scotia became a virtual backyard.
College was also not a permanent state in life. I graduated and took my extensive knowledge of history, and six thousand dollars from my mother and purchased a two-hundred year old farm house and 140 acres on the rocky shores of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy. The backyard was a 20 acre hay field. It is hard to enjoy a hay field as a backyard because haying at least the way we did it back then with square bales was a major amount of very hard work. Our yard did become more of a yard since I got married and my wife eventually got her way. We ended up with a Toro push lawn mower and a pretty good yard for a home that was previously surrounded by sheep pasture. It is true that once you start using a lawn mower, it is hard or nearly impossible to go back to bush hogging your grass.
As much as I loved Nova Scotia, I only lived there three years the first time. My wife and I decided to try farming and New Brunswick looked like a better place to do it. We bought a two-hundred acre farm in the hardwood hills north of the provincial capital, Fredericton. Our farmhouse did not really have a backyard but it hardly mattered, we ended up with 200 head of cattle and three children. There was no time to enjoy a backyard even if we had one. The children had plenty of places to play in the woods behind the home.
We ran our cattle operation for about ten years before I did a massive career switch and started a career in technology. That eventually resulted in a job with Apple and a move to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We bought one of the few houses on the market at the time. It did not have a backyard. Halifax is a city so that is somewhat understandable. We tried. We hauled in dirt for a garden but had to get a backhoe to root out the rocks so there was room for the tiny garden.
Halifax only lasted three years because I took a job with Apple in Columbia, Maryland. This time we bought a house with a backyard filled with pine trees. Unfortunately, most of them were dead. Even worse, it took a long while to convince the Columbia Association that we were not defoliating Columbia by cutting down the dead pines. We got them all cleaned up just before we moved to Roanoke, Virginia. I got one of the worst cases ever of poison ivy trying to speed the backyard along.
Our move to Roanoke was not a split second decision. I spent a lot of time riding around the Roanoke Valley with a wonderful lady, Vivian who was also a very good real estate agent. We eventually found an amazing home on the side of a mountain with you guessed it, no backyard. Still we raised our children in Roanoke and the spectacular view from our back deck almost made up for the cliff that passed for our backyard.
In 2006, we decided to live one of my dreams and try life on North Carolina's Crystal Coast. We bought a wonderful home on the water in a marsh just off the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle. I am sure no one is surprised to learn our house had no backyard unless you count the water and the marsh. It was 2012 before we sold our home and really bid good-bye to Roanoke.
Even life on the coast cannot compete with grandchildren so in February 2021, we moved to the foothills of North Carolina just west of Winston-Salem only about twenty-five minutes from where I went to elementary school and enjoyed my first backyard.
The startling news is that our new house has a backyard. Instead of immediately doing anything with it, we have enjoyed just looking at what is really the first backyard that we have been able to enjoy in our marriage. It has been a long journey back to a true backyard.
This is the first of twenty-two posts that I hope to write between now and November 24. Doing that will get this site to a total of fifteen hundred posts since my first post here on November 23, 2004.
Great piece, David. It makes me long for a back yard too. All I have in the back now are parking spaces and an alley!
Posted by: Andy McKinnon | November 02, 2021 at 03:58 PM