In Another Life
Last night at language exchange, we were answering some icebreaker questions (I love icebreakers). I ended up telling them a bit about life growing up in the US, and it struck me once again how it is such a completely different lifestyle. I told them about my dad building our house, doing most of the work himself. At a young age my siblings and I helped paint trim or collect fallen nails. I climbed across the slippery steel roof on our two-story house to hand tools to my dad who was working on the swamp cooler (in retrospect, was that a good idea???). We dug stones out of the ground and hauled them back to our place to make a retaining wall in our yard (you are allowed to gather a certain amount of rocks from national land for personal use). When I wanted to make a garden, my dad took me to the local rodeo ground to pick up old manure which we carted back and tilled into our weak shale soil so the vegetables would have the nutrients they needed. It was a fairly successful ga...