My
Own Back Yard
People
always talk about how they find stuff in weird places. I heard my
parents talk about finding a skeleton in Aunt June's closet once. They whispered about it and they didn't act like it was a good thing,
but I think its cool that she has a skeleton in her closet. I
wouldn't be scared if I saw it. Maybe she'll let me play with it
sometime. Last week, my Aunt Sara, who's not really my Aunt but who
is around so much she seems like an Aunt, said to Mom that my big
cousin Daniel, the one my Mom always tells me not to sit by or let
see my underpants, crawled out from under a rock and Mom said he
lived there. Guess it must be a big rock. Mom says it's ok to call
Aunt Sara aunt because she's too much older than my brother Joey and
me, and it's too weird to call her Mrs. Allen like we don't really
know her. Mom says it's like she's family, cause she sorta is even
though she isn't. Wouldn't that be funny, to pick up a rock and see
Danny's face looking up? I wonder where that rock is.
Yesterday
my teacher was talking about how folks find things in their own
backyards all the time. She said there is treasure there and read us
a story bout how some kids went all over the world looking for their
family's chest cause it had all the family fortune in it, and was
lost and they were going to be poor and stuff if they didn't find it. Anyway, after a bunch of adventures and stuff they found the chest
buried in their own backyard. Tommy Skinow who sits behind me and
pulls my hair said he found an old metal box with matchbox cars and
toy soldiers and stuff buried in his backyard once..... he guessed it
had been put there by some kid who lived in his house a long time
before him cause the box was all rusty and had holes in it.
Mrs
Lafitte, she's my teacher, said the chest in the story also had
old-time paper letters in it, and those letters let the kids in the
story know who they were, and that had been the real treasure of the
story, though if it were me, I'd rather have had the gold and stuff,
cause I know who I am. Mrs. Lafitte said the story
was something like an al-le-gory, and that it was really about stuff
you couldn't see like faith and security. I first thought she said
alligator and couldn't figure out why she was calling the story an
alligator., but she really said a new word.... al-le-gory. She said
it meant that no one has to go anywhere to find the valuable stuff in
life. Sheeesh, shes so slooooow sometimes. I mean, if its buried in
the backyard, of course you don't have to go anywhere, but
those kids didn't KNOW it was there. That's the whole point. Anyway, Mrs. Lafitte says you can find stuff like inspiration and
courage in your own backyard. She says everyone has stuff buried
there. I guess it's like Tommy's box he found which made him feel
happy and like playing war with the cars and soldiers.
I
thought about it all the way home on the bus and after I got there
and had a snack, I told Mom I was going into the backyard to play,
but I was really going to look for the treasure. I got one of Mom's
little hand shovels from the shed and dug through all the sand in
Joey's sandbox and all I found were some of his weeble wobble people
and some cat poo poo. I know it was cat poo poo cause it looks just
like what Dudley our cat leaves in his sandbox in the house. I
didn't think any of this was treasure, so I went and started digging
in Mom's flower beds. I was real careful not to hurt the flowers and
make Mom mad. She got really mad at us one time when Joey and I were
jumping in big mounds of them. Mom called them football mums........
they were soft and tickled, but we kinda ruined them. I dug and dug
until Dad called me in for supper. I didn't find anything at all and
I was kinda mad cause I coulda been playing with Sally Jane across
the street or playing Animal March on the Wii. But I wasn't so mad
after dinner, and I still really wanted to find the treasure, so I
got my blue sweater with the hoodie and went back outside. I decided
to really look at everything in the backyard, maybe I could
see something like a clue. I looked at everything, I looked into all
the bushes, I looked in the playhouse, I looked in the cracks of the
wood fence my Dad calls a stockade. I looked in the birdhouse and
then got scratches looking behind the rose trellis. I even looked
under that dumb gnome with the pointy red hat by the birdbath and
that's when I heard it...... a kind of peeping. I thought it was
maybe a magic chick that would grow up to lay golden eggs, but I
couldn't find it anywhere. I looked and looked. Finally I sat down
and really concentrated. I listened real hard and finally I saw it. It was a teeny tiny little brown frog hanging on the bottom side of
one of Mom's lily leaves, the ones that have flowers like white
hearts with yellow candles sticking up from them. He was so small I
could have put him inside one of those matchbox cars if they opened
up the right way, and he peeped like a chick, but he's not a chick, so
that makes him special. But how is a frog treasure? I got to
thinking maybe he is really rare like those gold frogs Mr. Derby the
science teacher told us about, the ones they think might have
disappeared. Maybe he's like that and someone will pay a lot of
money to see him. I tore off the leaf Mr. Peeps was sitting on,
that's what I named him, and took it into the house. Dad helped me
make a home for him in the old glass fish box. We put dirt on the
bottom and one of Mom's violets in the dirt. Dad filled a jar top
with water and put it in the dirt too. Then he put in a rock from
the backyard and some twigs and leaves and stuff and covered it with
a screen. He said Mr. Peeps' home was a ter-re-ri-um
and tomorrow I could take Mr. Peeps to school with me to see if Mr.
Darby knows what kind of frog he is.
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