All I remember from my boyhood summer days was weeding that damned garden and mowing the huge front yard.
I made it fun. Not the weeding - orders of which I tended to ignore - but the lawn mowing.
Twenty years before those years, my old man tried his hand in being a suburban freeholder. He bought raw land, he built on it - a pretty-crude flat-roofed cinder-block house (still stands, but with a pitched roof added) and a large yard he intended to make into a garden. For that, he bought a Gravely tractor.
The house was sold; he had two moves in his future, but the Gravely followed. Parked in the back of the garage, with a heavy-armored snowblower attachment more-or-less permanently bolted on.
The 30-inch brush-hog rotary (four blades, no belts) sat rusting under pine trees he'd planted ten years earlier.
I wearied of pushing a cheap Sears lawnmower over our substantial yard; but - I'm a machinery addict - I always found the Gravely fascinating. This was the early 1970s; and yes, we had Glow Bull Warming then, two. The Northeast had about four winters largely free of snow...that ended in January 1977, but that's another story.
So I'd use the Gravely once a year or so - amazingly it would start up. Starting those old Model Ls was not easy; but it wasn't that much harder than any other time (you wrapped a leather strap around an external flywheel, and braced yourself like you were pulling down a building, you yanked and maybe it would fire one pop, enough to carry it...)
It hit me that I could use the Gravely to mow 3/4 of the lawn (where collecting clippings didn't matter) faster, easier and more pleasurably. The walk-behind tractor of course was self-propelled, and pretty fast when run wide-open. Cut the time mowing down by more than half, and probably helped keep the tractor operational right up into the 2000s.
But...yeah. Even with chores, summer was what you made of it.
