I was fortunate growing up to have a large backyard to play in, covered by a canopy of mature oak trees. In the earliest days in our family home (1965-1975), you could walk into the backyard and stroll right into an oak forest untouched by encroaching residential development.

Some of my earliest memories in this wooded wonderland were of summer days when I would take a bedroom pillow, lay down on the grass, and peer up at the giant, leafy limbs swaying in the breeze. I can still hear the whispers of the trees as they gestured, bowed, and danced at the insistence of the summer winds.

I was convinced as a child if I could punt a football high enough to hit those lofty branches, I could try out as a punter for the Green Bay Packers. I never got the chance. Then again, I never kicked the football high enough to bounce off the branches.

A prominent feature of the property was a limestone patio built into the hill on the north side of the lawn. My Dad built a curved wall out of flat limestone rocks, which also paved the patio floor and served as steps up to the sidewalk that led into the house.

There were small gaps between the rocks on the patio floor. They sprouted weeds every year. We hated being assigned the task to pull weeds in the patio. After picking up the detritus, we had to use a whisk broom to carefully guide the pebbles back into place between the rocks.

The ground just beyond the asphalt driveway was home to numerous garden plots over the years. In the 1970s when the economy hit the skids, we had a serious garden stocked with green and yellow beans, green peppers, strawberries, onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes. From those harvests came pickles, strawberry jam, and vegetables for the dinner table.

Land farthest to the west had a couple of buried boulders that peeked out from the ground just enough to make perfect bases for a very tight baseball field. We never dug them up. Perhaps they still serve as bases for another generation of children.

The backyard was host to a wealth of critters from chipmunks and gophers to field mice, occasional deer, and even a snapping turtle. I don’t know if we ever figured out how a large snapping turtle found its way up to the house. A friend of Mom and Dad came over from Carriage Hills and captured the creature. I recall some comments about turtle soup. I did not want to think about that.

The large oak trees needed occasional maintenance. In the 1970s we had one of the worst ice storms ever seen in this part of Wisconsin. The house was without power for three days. My Dad was stranded someplace and could not get home. The eerie calm outside was often interrupted by the sickening crack of a branch giving way under the weight of the ice.

Later that year I distinctly remember Dad pruning some of the large, dead branches using a rope thrown from below. He attached a fairly hefty rock to a heavy-gauge rope, then swung it like David when he felled Goliath. Up the rock went, the rope wrapped around the branch and Dad pulled the dead weight down.

Dad wore a white terry cloth sweatband on his head. It’s funny the details that stick with me so many years later. That’s how I saw my father while growing up. Slaying the biggest problems, seemingly unafraid of the size or complexity of the task at hand.

For decades we had a “bird feeder” that was in reality a squirrel feeder. It was a wooden box nailed to perhaps the largest oak tree on the property. Sometimes we had bird food to put in it, but more often we were sent out with stale bread.

The backyard was home to improvised ice rinks during a few winters. In the early years, we could peer through the woods all the way to the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Broadway Drive. At the time it was an empty lot. The city would come and open the fire hydrant to flood the lot and make a perfect ice rink.

I don’t know which shocked me more: Dad zooming around the perimeter of the rink in speed skates, or Mom showing some unexpected skill on her white figure skates. I have an image in my mind of us all skating on that rink under nothing but moonlight. I’m not sure if that ever happened, but that’s how I remember it.

Those skates, like the memories they held, got tucked into boxes in the basement. More than 50 years later, the skates, winter clothes, the house, and the frozen empty lot are all gone.

Yet the images in my mind remain.

The biggest challenge that came with such a wooded lot was the blizzard of leaves that laid down a thick carpet every October and November. A half-acre of fall leaves usually required four to six able-bodied souls armed with bamboo rakes.

Some years we all raked the bounty into a massive pile, then spent an hour romping through the leaf mountain. That practice was eventually abandoned when we had golden retrievers, whose golden nuggets inevitably got mixed in with the leaves.

With such a bounty of trees, the backyard also attracted a bounty of birds. In later years, Mom had a birdfeeder that looked like a little red schoolhouse atop a 5-foot pole. The cardinals were partial to safflower seeds, so that was the staple stocked in the feeder.

When living at Mom’s house for a year when she was in a care center, I set up a tripod and camera in the sunroom and shot photos of the birds through the windows. It was fascinating to see which ones ruled the roost and which others were able to feed unnoticed when the big guys and gals were around.