A bit o' redneck fun

My parents have a huge Osage Orange tree in the front yard. And that bad boy puts out a lot of fruit -- massive green grapefruit-sized fruit.


One of the chores at my parents' house is to throw the fruit across the road. Since my dad can't, and my mom doesn't have time, it's been largely neglected. The children and I decided to do that chore while we were there on Saturday.

It's boring work really, just throwing and throwing and more throwing. We always make it into a game though, what we've termed Redneck Bowling. Hey, when you're getting rid of more than 200 of these things, you do what you can to make it less monotonous! And anything is more fun as a game.

We throw the fruit across the road, and usually one of them doesn't get quite all the way across. If one does stop in the road, we try to bowl the fruit across the road to hit the "stuck" one and get it across as well. Points are counted according to how many thrown, and double points for each hit on a "stuck" one. (I never said it was complex!)


Sass couldn't really throw them. They were way too big for her little hands, so she gathered them for Spyder and me.


I won, but only by a small margin, and only because I was able to bowl one out of the road. It sounds easy, but it's kind of tricky, since the fruit isn't perfectly round. The bumpy fruit rarely follows the path that the bowler hopes!

And just for kicks, here is a photo of "across the road."


I'll have to take a photo of it when it's filled with unripened wheat. I think it's most beautiful then.