© Jayson Slade 2010
People didn't buy bottled water in 1979. If you had water in a bottle it was because you put it there. And it usually came from a garden hose. When you're a kid in the summertime in south Mississippi, water in a bottle was a thin, warm, stale syrup. It was always hot. Tray ice would never fit through the neck of the bottle and trying to break those cubes in my hand by popping them with a table spoon only seemed to hurt my fingers.
I once tried putting a bottle of water in the freezer until it was a block of curvy ice, but before I even get good and started on my yard chores, it was be melted. The Mississippi heat completely melted it. It was pretty damn hot, to say the least. This happened several times in a row before I finally got the point. God was probably laughing at me. One of the days I was doing yard might not seem quite as hot as the last and from time to time I'd always try it again. But never to any success. For a smart kid, I guess I was a little slow in the area of science and how that related to keeping water cold.
Eventually, I'd come to realize that ice in water worked better than solid ice. So I would use a jug, a cooler or a 30 gallon ice chest, depending on the job. Before I had been around long enough to celebrate double digits, there was usually a Sunday or two a month my dad would have me outside picking up limbs and pine cones so he could mow the yard. The area around our home was about two acres, so the routine was simple. My job was to pile up the limbs and about an hour later my dad would go behind me with a small trailer attached to his riding lawn mower. He'd pick them up and haul them off before eventually mowing the yard. Since I was a kid, my jobs were the safe ones. Not safe in the sense of I might not get hurt, but safe in the sense that if (read: when) I did get hurt one of my parents would be close by enough to attend first-aid before the blood went everywhere.
(to be continued)
(to be continued)
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