the day better homes and, gardens didnt come. 

   when we were a lot younger and may i say dumber . mom in her infinite wisdom came up with a way to try and make us do things we probably wouldn't have done otherwise. it isn't so much we were lazy , but living on a farm,  a child has so many responsibilities .  like play in the creek, climb trees , pick on your little sister , anything but clean up toys or straighten up the house. all of those things and a million others were more fun than work. but mom found the most innovative way to get us moving. bribery and deception. works every time. 

    grandma and mom were avid readers of better homes and gardens and the picturesque city houses that adorned the jackets of the magazine were a far cry from where we lived in our old farmhouse, heated with a clanging banging coal stove . about the time you had the house heated up in the wintertime  it was time to go to bed and freeze the next morning when you woke up to do it all over again.    there was always a copy or two of better homes and gardens laying around the house , where we would thumb our way through issue after issue pretending we knew what it was all bout. our home was a roof over our head . modest as it was it was hardly ever going to be seen on the cover of better homes and gardens magazines , but us kids never knew that. instead it left us wide open to be hoodwinked by mom. 

     it was the early 60's and my older brothers had just started school and were blessed with new found intelligence , of which they eagerly shared with me in their sarcastic i am smarter than you way. who was i to doubt their wisdom in such things as realizing a good deal when you see it. so when mom gathered us together to announce the news that the very one and only better homes and gardens was coming to take pictures of our house and that we needed to get things cleaned  up , skeptical as i was , i immediately looked at the enthusiasm of my older brothers and knew that this could be the real thing. 

    in fact as the work plan was laid out i could see my older brothers taking charge and informing us all of work needed to be done to make the place ship shape. toys were picked up and messes were cleaned up as mom silently slank off to a corner to watch this transformation of a simple farmstead into a picturesque front page cover . we worked ourselves into a frenzy , biting at each others remarks as we grew tired as we were just young kids and obviously not used to such a task. but on we pressed until we could find no more to trouble ourselves with. it was time to clean up and wait for the photographer to pull in with his shiny car. 

    mom was suddenly no where to be found , and we started searching as we needed to know when this big event was going to happen. apparently mom was overcome by the excitement and decided to take a nap. 

 hardly the thing you would think someone who is about to be visited by the favorite magazine of the time would do. we pressed her for more information and then she let loose with a big laugh as she lay on the bed and told us it was all made up and that in fact they were not coming and that she nearly burst open with laughter watching us scurry around like ants heading to an anthill , doing all we did . and that the place never looked better but even she would hardly doubt that better homes and gardens would ever visit us. 

      it was at this moment i learned something about my family. laughter is best when taking someone in the family for a ride , even better when it is the whole family. second thing i learned is that with all that fancy schooling my brothers had that made them better than me , they were still a long way off from where they needed to be, intellectually speaking. their eagerness to be sucked in to moms scheme in fact left us all a little wiser. i would  forever doubt their ability to be an expert on anything. looking back i still have to smile at this story, and isn't that what memories should be about.