I was on the roof again.

I was there because of a Hi-Bounce rubber ball.

The ball was made by Spalding. I’d throw it against the house and play catch with myself. I’d bounce it off the house until my mother would call me in for dinner.

Sometimes an errant toss would cause the ball to become lodged in an eaves trough.

I’d get the ladder and climb up onto the roof to retrieve the ball.

My big feet were not always kind to the roof. I broke a couple of shingles.

This caused a leak in the roof. My father complained that the leak was so bad that when it rained it took him an hour-and-a-half to finish a bowl of soup.

My parents had gone to town, making the questionable decision to leave me home alone.

I thought I’d surprise them by fixing the roof.

I’d climbed onto the roof with some leftover shingles, a handful of bent nails and a claw hammer missing one claw.

I had quickly grown weary of the task. You might say that I no longer wanted to fish in that pond.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a biscuit my mother had made. I’d poked a hole into it and filled the cavity with honey. I removed the wax paper that held this tasty morsel and hunkered down on the roof to enjoy my treat.

There was a nice breeze blowing. The windmill clattered in the distance and the sheets hanging on the clothesline popped in the wind. From my vantage point, I admired the symmetry of our lilac-lined yard.

I polished off the biscuit and honey and began whistling while I didn’t work. I was thankful that I was a boy as I had been told more than once that no one liked whistling girls or crowing hens.

It was then that I saw the car coming up our drive.

A plume of steam was coming from the radiator. A leaky radiator come to boil was a routine disaster in those bygone days.

Seeing visitors took the tired right out of me and I scrambled down the ladder.

The driver asked if he might have some water for his radiator, complaining that the car was no account and had always been so.

He wished out loud that new cars weren’t more than a normal person could afford.

I fetched a pail of water and watched as the man poured it slowly into his radiator.

He looked at one of our Allis-Chalmers tractors and told me that he had one just like it. He loved that tractor.

He said that if he had a choice of losing an arm or losing that tractor, he reckoned he’d get used to driving the tractor one-handed.

His wife was watching our chickens pursuing grasshoppers in the yard. The chickens liked to keep moving as the resident chicken hawk was faster than a speeding pullet.

Our chickens were free-roaming cluckers that enjoyed nothing more than scratching in the dirt and taking a bath in the dust.

&uot;Do you ever sell the eggs?&uot; the lady asked.

&uot;There’s nothing quite like fresh eggs.&uot;

This was in the day when eggs, bacon and sun were good for us.

We did sell eggs. My parents had just taken a couple of cases of the hen fruit to Sibilrud’s Grocery in town.

Sibilrud’s bought the eggs by giving the Batts credit that we turned into food from the Grocery’s shelves.

The lady added that if I would sell her some, she’d give me a dollar for a dozen.

A whole dollar!

I told her that I was sure I could scare up a dozen and headed for the chicken house to check with the girls.

I reached under each hen and came up with 11 eggs and a few pecks from the hens for my trouble.

I washed the eggs and put them in a used egg carton.

I told the lady that if she wouldn’t mid waiting, I’d have the 12th egg shortly as I had put a number of hens to work on the project.

She didn’t mind waiting and her husband added that he would just as soon be where he was as where he was going.

Ten minutes later, I heard the proud cackling of an egg-laying hen. I quickly gathered the egg and as I gave it to the woman I apologized for the wait.

She paid me an extra 25 cents for the overtime the hens had worked.

(Hartland resident Al Batt writes a column for the Tribune each Wednesday and Sunday.)