My Grandpa taught my siblings and I what a good days work was. When I was thirteen we lived with our Grandparents for a bit and I cannot remember a Saturday when we did not have some project that we were assigned to do. Our tasks included helping Grandpa fix up a car for our Aunt, building a fence, helping to move an old shack to be used as a barber shop and of course, the usual mowing and caring for the yard. I appreciate the lessons learned now, but at the time it felt pretty brutal.
Flash forward a few years when I had moved closer to my grandparents to go to school. My brother Cole and I went down to our Grandparents house for Thanksgiving. We brought along our friend Dave and spent the night in the basement. In the morning we went out to throw a football around. We went to the front yard which had some snow in it. We were tossing the old pigskin around when my Grandpa came out and said, “You should go to the backyard where there is less snow.” We all thought, “Yeah that makes sense.” But there was still something in the back of our minds that didn’t seem right. Dave can smell manual labor from 10 miles away and disappeared into the house without saying anything. Cole and I went around to the back and hadn’t even thrown a pass when Grandpa said, “Hey, while you’re back here, come give me a hand with this.” We dropped the ball and went to help. It seemed like a 2 minute task. He wanted us to load an old fridge onto a trailer. We loaded it up easily enough then Grandpa asked us to drive it over to his shed and unload it. We got to the shed and we had to reorganize the shed with him. You can see how things just snowball.
Well, after we were done we went back into the house to find Dave. He was in the basement playing Grandma’s video games. Dave said he knew what was coming so he got out of there. That’s just fine, especially since he was a guest and shouldn’t have to work, it’s just funny that he disappeared so quickly.
We wouldn’t really remember just throwing a football around, but we definitely remember the time Grandpa tricked us into working on Thanksgiving morning.