Hose Water

 Today I've nothing really much to say, but just wanted to start posting pictures again. For some reason my iPhone photos aren't linked to my Google account, so it won't post pictures on here when I try to blog from the phone. But here I am on the laptop, where my Google account and the accompanying photos on it, are linked to my old Android. Strange, but true.  

Ellen will probably flip if she ever sees this photo, but I'm posting it anyway because it brings up many of my own childhood memories.  

Where I grew up our lives in the summer centered around gardening; weeding, hoeing, tilling, harvesting, shelling peas, snapping green beans, shucking corn, and watering with garden hoses. There on the North Coast of California, in Humboldt County, it rarely got up to 80 degrees in the summer. I didn't even know what air conditioning was back then. During the summers back then it didn't rain.  Humboldt County is known for being quite wet in the fall and winter, but about June the rains dry up. It gets quite foggy in the mornings and late afternoons, the fog will roll in off the ocean and coat things in a fine mist, but like I said, it would rarely rain at all during the summer.  Therefore we spent a great deal of time watering.  Usually for the garden my dad would use some sort of oscillating sprinkler, the larger ones that would go back and forth across the corn, peas, carrots, cucumbers...etc.  We kids would play in it of course, and get in trouble for doing so.  Ha ha...  But there were always hoses lying around unattached to any sprinklers. We would use them to wash whatever produce we'd pick, veggies or fruit. Or to get a drink from. No one back then knew the difference; water was water and we would slug it down from the end of the hose; cool, refreshing.  Then we'd put a finger across the end and squirt one another and run around shrieking and laughing. 

On rare occasions I'd have friends over and of course we'd all do the same.  To them having gardens and hoses was a novelty, so of course they'd learn to drink from a hose and how to squirt the water everywhere.  

Fun times.

Ellen's life here hasn't centered as much on gardening as my early life did, but she still has had her times of watering and playing with hoses.  I am glad she has those memories, too, at least a little bit anyway.