Pop's Projects - Nez

 

My Mom’s mother was Letha Davison. I never got to meet my grandmother. She died when Mom was sixteen, several years before I was even thought of. She is buried in the Lyman cemetery in the adjoining grave to her eldest daughter, mom’s sister, my Aunt Thelma, who I also never got to meet. Aunt Thelma had died two years earlier than grandmother while giving birth to  Milton, her only child. Their graves are beside the north fence of the cemetery, right where Pop Davis could keep an eye on them. Except for a barbed-wire fence they were basically in his front yard. That fence divided all of Pop’s property and the cemetery, about a hundred yards wide.

Pop Davis place was just three houses around the corner from us, yet our families weren’t particularly close. Though he was retired Pop was always busy. I guess he wasn’t anxious to claim a spot across the fence just yet. He kept a really nice looking place. And you rarely found him sitting around unless he was in town talking to voters and families. Pop was a longtime town council member. Oftentimes, you found him home working in the yard or on a project or fishing. But every few weeks you could find him in town talking with people and building relationships. I thought he was old, but he was probably only in his sixties, and he still climbed ladders, worked in his orchard and built anything he wanted.

Pop’s small old unpainted barn sat about twenty yards from his house and about as far from the cemetery, among the fruit trees in his large orchard. If you weren’t paying attention you didn’t even notice the barn. He used it for storage and kept it locked. We figured there were all kinds of treasures in there. The orchard was several acres and had walnut, hazelnut, apple, plum, cherry, and pear trees. There were at least fifteen trees, several quite large, and they all produced every season. Each season he harvested all he needed, then he invited others come and take what they needed for their personal use. Pop kept baskets of apples for his cider and applejack. The still was in his basement. He could have taken his fruits to local stores and sold them but he chose to share. He had a big smokehouse between two big cherry trees.

His only other field was treeless, was beyond the orchard and was contiguous to our school grounds. At times we cut through his fields as a shortcut to school. He didn’t like it and would yell at us to go around, which meant through the cemetery. But if we were already in the second field we just kept going. Pop rented out that field. There were three semi-wild horses there for years. They were never ridden or worked. Nobody got near them. If we tried they ran away. I never understood why they were there.

I never understood this either. I thought houses were normally built facing the street, but not our neighbor’s, Pop Davis. His house should have faced east toward the street. He certainly had the space. But no, his house faced south, toward the cemetery, just across the fence from his front yard. His neighbor, George Davidson, directly across the street, was just the opposite. George should have built his house facing west, but it faced north toward the hills. Every other house in Lyman faced the street. Two neighbors houses facing the wrong way from each other was weird. No one knew why and it remains a mystery to this day.

Another project Pop did was when he tore down his old single car garage all by himself, preserving all of the old lumber from which he built the footings, had a concrete floor poured and then built a modern two-car garage and workshop, which he painted white both inside and out. The attic was extra tall for storage and he installed windows and hay-loft type doors on each end. He put red shutters on the windows. He could reach those doors from the bed of his pickup. He had stairs up to the attic in his workshop. Except for pouring the concrete floor Pop did all the work himself in just a few months. Other than a table saw he didn’t have power tools. The garage matched the look of his house. He was that good.

Pop kept a pristine front yard and lawn facing the cemetery. It was like a flower garden with several trees. But one Spring  he tore it up and dug a large hole in the yard. At first people thought he might be digging a grave, but it was too large for that. You could have put a whole family in there. Then we thought maybe it was going to be a swimming pool, but it wasn’t deep enough. After a couple of weeks with this new project taking shape, it was done. He had built a big, beautiful koi pond with big golden koi right in front of my aunt’s and grandmother’s graves.  He surrounded it with flower beds and placed Adirondak chairs looking across the pond at the cemetery. Their graves were not ten feet from his koi pond. When my Mom visited her mother’s and sister's graves she really enjoyed Pop’s koi pond and told him so. Pop replied, “It’s for your family. You should sit and relax in the chairs.”

 

Nez Nesmith

October 2024

 

Note: Though we only lived in Lyman for sixteen formative years, I walked or ran or bicycled to every nook and cranny of the town. That whole town was my playground and growing up there in the 1940s and 1950s I still remember every road, street, alley, barn, building and house in Lyman during those years. It was a tiny town of only 435 people and while I may no longer always remember what I did yesterday, I still have those memories from long ago.