Growing up on the chicken ranch meant that my brother Graham and I had the luxury of having a very large yard. We had a nice sandbox and a swimming pool to play freely in. We also had a pretty extensive lawn with a giant palm tree and another tree smack dab in the center that Grandpa Robesky was buried under (yes, that requires another tale for explanation).
In addition to our big playground we had a lot of animals roaming around. Some of my childhood pets included dogs, cats, lambs, goats and birds. At the time that this photo was taken we were in the midst of a particularly productive cat spawning episode. Somehow our cat “Mitty Kitty” had been impregnated by “Doorstop” and the litter had grown and were now inbreeding into a collection of slightly deformed feral kittens. My brother and I took to naming the kittens strange names such as Hitler (he had a little moustache) and Deformity (he had a crick in his tail). Needless to say, my mother and father were less than thrilled about the overrunning of inbred cats on our property…
On the ranch my brother and I would come up with various chores around the house where we could extract cashola out of our parents. Some of these tasks included washing the car (complete with water spots) and mowing the lawn. I never had to mow the lawn because I was a delicate flower. Graham on the other hand was pretty into the whole lawn mowing chore as it was quite lucrative for a 10 year old and paid about $8.
