Personal Narrative: Landscaping Home

The hot sun burns against my dripping back as I hold a prickling pile of freshly cut pine leaves to throw away. They sting my flesh as they pass the pores of my dad’s worn-out red working gloves I wear. Each thorn is like a stab against my pride and a crying demand for me to surrender. As my legs wear heavy and my fingers cramp, I can only wonder if I will ever see the end of this day.

During summers, I am reluctantly dragged along to help my father with his landscaping contracts for his clients. While he mows the lawn, I am placed in charge of adding mulch, planting flowers, and gathering the cut tree limbs and leaves. I used to despise days like these because my father would sometimes pay me in cash while other times he claimed he “paid me with lunch.” I didn’t truly understand the importance of landscaping back then, however, all along my dad was secretly planting into me an important life lesson.

I crept up to this realization one blistering summer day where I was tasked with “mulch duty.” Dressed in my navy blue T-shirt, green high-water sweatpants, and old black school sneakers, I glazed up at the threatening pallet of dry mulch bags. Despite of their light weight, the task of adding mulch remained unchanged. Unenthusiastically, I grabbed a 20-lb mulch bag off the truck and made a beeline to the pool area with

As I sit on the concrete under the shade, I gulp down a bottle of water. My mom yells at me to “get going,” but I cease to move. As it turns out, we needed more bags of mulch, so my dad arrives back from The Home Depot with 40 more bags. And if I have any hope of getting out of here, I know I will have to help out. So, I lift myself from the ache that binds me to this concrete and head to the truck to get another mulch bag. This time I look at the bags of mulch with eyes of fury and I cease myself from negative attitudes of “I