parents | Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

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Reboot – Guarding Generations: A Writing Prompt

Posted at 8:38 am by Mary J. McCoy-Dressel, on February 16, 2023

Hello folks. I’m publishing this previous post from 2012 as a Reboot. It’s Thursday, but I’m not calling it Throwback Thursday. Instead of using “Press This” or “Reblog,” I made a copy of it to start fresh. Besides, all “older” comments are turned off on my blog and the original post. The first title for this post was “The End of the Story.”

This was first written for a word prompt from a site I used to follow called Write on Edge. I don’t think they’re still operating. The site didn’t show up in a search. I’ve updated bits and pieces to bring parts of it up to date, and also because the original had a word count of 400, so I added a few more words this time. At the time of writing this in 2012, I followed a prompt from the info below:

This week is PERSONIFICATION. The dictionary defines personification as “the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.”

Why Reboot This post?

I rediscovered this post when it showed up in my Stats as a click, so a visitor to my site came across it. This brought it to my attention again.

My take on the prompt – Personification:

Here I sit in the cold again. I’ve seen it all – cold, heat, sun, rain, and snow. But I don’t even care. You see, I’m just an old yard pump now. Oh, in my day they depended on me for water. You betcha, I’m that old. After the grandma sold the farm I went with her family to the next house where they used me for my looks. The middle son, “E.H.” and his wife, took care of me after a while because his mother thought I would look nice in his flower bed. She was right, for I looked grand.

E.H. painted me blue. Nice! Years later, he painted me yellow. I beamed like a ray of sunshine all year long. I sat in his flower bed for a lot of years in two different homes. The family reminisced about grandma and the farm house when they sat in lawn chairs, looking at me standing there like a yard guard. Secretly, I did guard them. hehe.

Then came grandsons. Five of them, but after five months and one day, the number dropped to four. Sadness encompassed their family. Later, the four boys went back to playing with my handle; up and down until I thought I’d break.

Boys will be boys.

E.H. tossed small fireworks in my direction at least once a year. Being a hard piece of cast iron, I guess they thought I could take it. Wrong! His wife kept weeds from overtaking me until she disappeared.

After another while, I didn’t see E.H. much. His kids were grown and the grandkids didn’t play with my handle anymore. One day a big black car pulled into his driveway, and I never saw him again. His daughter, Mary… Excuse me, I mean her husband, because he had more strength, pulled me out of the ground, and I landed in her yard right beside the garage as you see below. Often, she’d sit on her deck top step and look at me. She cried sometimes.

A few years later, and without warning, I didn’t see her anymore. Her husband called an ex now, yanked me out of the ground and tipped me over on my side for a long time! One day she appeared again and took me on a long ride. Lo and behold I had my life back in another yard. Mary had a gigantic dog at that house. Whew, I’m glad it wasn’t a male!

Then, some years later, Mary disappeared and something bad must have happened in the house because everything got moved out. No one remained, not even the dog, the little girl, or the man who lived there with Mary. I saw the day they got married and took pictures near me, but… he was really gone. I got shoved in a cold garage on a concrete floor with some of his tools. What would become of me?

Almost a year later she came back for me. Happiness reined! I lived again to guard Mary in a new yard. One of those boys who used to pull my handle lived there, so there I was with another generation. Again, their dog wasn’t a male! Somehow I knew she was a part of E.H., and he was a part of Grandma who started it all.

A final word: “Somewhere along the line, I had a white paint job, so yes, the pump, aka guard, in the photos is yours truly.

2022 UPDATE: Two moves ago when I had no place to keep “the pump” we parted ways. I hope wherever he is, he has forgiven me. MJ

Thanks for taking the time to read. It may look like I haven’t visited your blogs, my friends, but I’ve been reading them without commenting. I hope to get back to commenting on them soon. I’m taking some “me” time and writing or thinking about writing.

Enjoy your weekend.

Posted in #AmWriting, Word Prompt | 12 Comments | Tagged #WritersLife, generations, grandkids, grandma, Guarding Generations, mary j mccoy dressel, memories, parents, personification, yard pump

Christmas Memories

Posted at 12:01 pm by Mary J. McCoy-Dressel, on December 20, 2010

Did you believe in Santa Claus when you were a child? I don’t know if I did. I remember picking out a lot of my own Christmas gifts, but that was when I was older. My earliest memory (I think) was a snowy night in Detroit. It was my parents, my little brother, and me. We lived with my grandmother then. It was nighttime and the side street we lived on was covered with snow. There was only car tracks up and down the road with nothing shoveled or plowed; the snow was deep. I remember the snow covered street because that evening, Christmas Eve, my parents took my brother and I down the street to the hardware store before they closed. They bought us a wagon. A shiny red wagon. They pulled us home in it down that snowy street through the car tracks. It wasn’t easy to pull two kids in a wagon through the snow.

I don’t know if my parents believed in surprises. Wrapping my own Christmas gifts, and putting them under the tree was really the only way I knew Christmas at my house. I did it many times, and my mom did the same thing with her gifts even after us kids grew up and left home. She said that way she could choose
her own gift. Christmas morning was never a surprise at my house as a child. Christmas at my aunt and uncles was always different. We visited early and always had surprise gifts to unwrap. I watched as my cousins opened gift after gift and were surprised at each one. I envied them. I felt like Santa came to their house and not mine. I loved being at their house, whether it was Christmas or not.

Did I carry on that tradition with my own kids? Not at all. Everything was wrapped and nothing got opened until Christmas morning. Everything was a surprise for my boys and everyone else. And they believed in Santa Claus. I encouraged them to believe in Santa. We’d go to the mall and have pictures taken with the jolly man in a red suit.

When we grew up, on Christmas Eve my brother and I always took our families to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. It was then we got to unwrap surprise gifts. I don’t know the reason behind us picking out our own Christmas gifts as children. I suppose it was something my parent’s agreed on and figured we would get what we wanted that way.

But, times changed when they became grandparents. The grandchildren had fun times at their house, and we did too. Even though all the kids are grown now and grandma and grandpa are both gone, I still carry many Christmas memories. Maybe they were different but Christmas was still Christmas. We still had gifts and food and love.

I had step-grandchildren for a time and Christmas with them was a joy, exciting, and filled with love. It was the true meaning of Christmas to see the sparkle in their eyes. When the day comes that I have my own
grandchildren, they will know surprises and believe Santa Claus brought them. Of course they’ll always have their own Christmas memory of Grandma’s love.