Now, Old McDonald is quite a guy. As far as “Do-It-Your-Self-ers” go, he is the man. Old McDonald has lived here for over 30 years. I’ve only been here for the last 10 of those years, but that’s long enough to be quite amazed by the jobs he’s pulled off. To date, I’ve been a bystander as he installed his own sprinkler system, laid the wood floor in his house, tiled his front porch, and hung his own front door. However, in the 20 years before I got here there’s no telling what he did.
I like to think of myself as a fairly savvy, home project kind of guy. Thanks to my dad, I can fix more than my fair share of things around the house. However, it’s more than a little bit humbling to discuss home repairs with Old McDonald, because I know that inside he’s just laughing.
Old McDonald is also quite the farmer. In the back-40, which is really just a strip in the alley out behind his house, he’s always got something good growing. For the last couple of years it’s been tomatoes and peppers. And baby, these are some seriously good tomatoes and some seriously hot peppers. Old McDonald went out of town for a few weeks and told me I could have any tomatoes that turned red while he was gone, not many did, but the ones that did were very, very tasty. Every time I went anywhere I made a close inspection of each tomato in the garden.
Little did I know that Old McDonald was taking his farming to a new level.
It was after Old McDonald got home, and we were talking over the fence about the tomatoes, my new foundation repair and all kinds of stuff, when he was telling me about some problem one of his gutter downspouts was having due to all the rain we’ve had.
He was in mid-sentence as he gestured up to the gutter on the second floor above his garage. What we saw silenced him, raised my eyebrows, and made both of us smile.
“Went with corn this year did ya?” Was all I could think to say.
I don’t remember exactly who said what, but we each made several wisecracks about keeping the rabbits off, how hard it was to plant, and being a bitch to harvest.
Like the song says;
“…and on his house he had some corn, ee-i-ee-i-oh!”
4 comments:
Okay, what exactly is that growing in his gutter? Because Old McDonald doesn't seem like the sort of guy to let that happen.
As far as we can tell it is corn!
We were gone for the weekend and when I got back he had already harvested the whole crop.
But it was the strangest thing I've ever seen growing in a gutter.
Yeah, but did he plant it on purpose? Did he put soil in his gutter and sow seeds there? Or was it some weird coincidence, like some kid tossed an ear of corn up there or something.
On purpose? I don't think so.
Old Mick is pushing 70, and as handy as he is, I can't see him climbing up to the second floor of his house just plant corn in the guttter.
What I think is some bird ate a bunch of corn somewhere and pooped it out while sitting in or on his gutter.
That's all I can come up with.
Whatever the reason, it was sight to see.
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