Most kids have a creative spirit. Thankfully for me, my grandfather didn’t crush mine, but gently and quietly encouraged it by being an entrepreneur himself. When I was 10, I asked my grandparents if I could earn some money by taking care of their yard. We worked out a deal where I got paid $25 a week for cutting the grass. I got an extra $10 for edging, $5 for weed whacking (which I generally avoided because I hated the weed-whacker), and all the food I could eat while I was there. In the winter I got $25 for shovelling the snow when it fell.
Within a summer, I was not only doing my grandparent’s yards, but also their neighbours and a few people around the block. I had 5 yards in total the first summer and winter, and by the second year I was up to 10 yards. I would travel from yard to yard, pull out their mowers and get to work. I would often do this on a weekend since it was a long process that lasted a day, and by the end I was exhausted. Once every couple of months, I would get the edger out of my grandparents garage and go edging everyone’s sidewalks after school.
It was by no means easy. Every weekend I spent a full day in my grandparent’s old neighbourhood, which I fondly referred to as “The Horseshoe” for the way it was shaped. I would greet everyone, chat for a few minutes, have a glass of tea, water or lemonade at the request of the owner while catching up about how life was going, and then get to work. I discovered early on that grass cuttings left red, itchy welts all over my skin, so I wore jeans for protection. I also had trouble breathing, so I had to invest in Benadryl every week to keep the allergic reaction to a minimum. All this hard work usually led to things like free food, free advice (usually on dating when I got older), and lots of older people as genuine friends of mine. I learnt that adults, although the arch-enemy of petulant teenagers everywhere, are not truly evil. I learnt a lot by listening to them and their woes that I wouldn’t have realised existed if I had stuck to my own little world.
On top of the life lessons, I made something like $600 a month depending on how many of those extras I did. Like any kid with money to spend, I bought things. I bought a supply of Benadryl, books, more books, some comic books…. and whatever else it was that I really fancied at the time. I had one rule, though. I never spent more than $100 a month. Ever. The rest I turned around and put into a savings account, which I then turned around and invested in CDs to earn extra interest after the balance reached $1000. By the end of high school, I had accumulated $20,000 in CDs that were in mine and my paternal Grandma’s name. I had another $300 in a bank account that was in mine and my mother’s name. Curiously, money kept going missing from this account, so I rarely put anything in it unless I had to. If that money hadn’t kept “disappearing”, I would have had $2,500 in it, $2,000 of which would have been converted to CDs. I kept particularly close attention to my finances even as early as my first year of working. I still have the notebooks describing down to the penny of where I spent my money. I know I didn’t spend the money, and that left only one other person. And she will never admit to the theft.
This $20,000 was to pay for my first apartment and my first year of undergraduate university life. I’d say wasn’t a bad way to end high school and start the next chapter of my life. It also started my love of working outside, with my hands, and usually in the dirt. I didn’t get much into gardening back then, but I still kind of miss taking the Benadryl and spending a full day talking to people, learning about life, and mowing the grass.
