This was taken in June 1966 in the back yard of our first Seattle house. The photographer was probably my mother. It was my job to mow the lawn and I hated it---not because of mowing as an activity, but because about 80% of the yard was sloped like this. Mowing it was a pain.

The yard was mostly unusable because of the gradient. It was good for the Slip 'N Slide, and barely adequate for badminton. Croquet was out of the question. To me the yard was wasted space.

When I went off to college, I was less available for mowing the lawn. That played a role in my parents’s decision to sell the house and move to a smaller property that was easier to maintain. The new house, not too far away, had a small, level yard, something my parents could handle by themselves.

That move took place about a month after this picture was taken. Thus in the photo above I might have been using the Jacobsen Turbocone lawn mower on this grass for the last time. I can still remember how the grass bag bobbed up and down as it filled up, suspended from a metal arm that imparted the bobbing motion. Sweet memories. Not.

This was scanned from a slide using a PrimeFilm PF3600u scanner
borrowed from Flickr user brewbooks.

(Shot on 25 Jun 1966 on slide roll 1966-02; scanned on 28 November 2009 as 20091128_008)