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Back when we were young, my brother’s and I used to love a summer picnic. We had squash blossoms, road kill burger surprise and yard salad. Yard salad was made up of dandelion greens, wild onions, twigs, weeds and, grasses we found in the yard. We used to mix ketchup, mustard, salad dressing, vinegar and, orange tang together to make a dressing to put over our yard salad. Dad also used the dressing as a cure for his hangovers. Overall, the food was pretty good.

After a filling meal, we would often have to burn off some energy by playing summertime games. We sometimes would play horseshoe. This got to be kind of boring since we only had one shoe. We found the shoe when we went down the road to investigate a nearby summer music camp. The camp had horses for the kids to ride and evidently a horse left one shoe behind. It was “finder’s keeper’s loser’s weepers” so; we kept the shoe to play horseshoe.

Horseshoe was not our favorite pastime and, it was not the game we played the most. My family enjoyed a good game of lawn jarts just about every time we had a picnic. I remember us kids were really excited when dad found a set and a half of lawn jarts while we were foraging at the local land fill. Rich kids would go with their families each week to the K-mart store to shop. My family went to the local landfill every Sunday after the tourists dumped off their garbage and went home. We would just sort of look around for stuff. We would find household items like dishes and broken clocks. We would also find things like tools, cloths and when we were lucky, we would find toys. The land fill did take some getting used too. It looked like a big mess but, it smelled just like grandma’s kitchen. This smell put us at ease. When it started to get dark, dad would tell us to get a move on. He said that the bears would be there soon. There are of course no bears in Michigan. People always mistake Big Foots for bears.

Lawn jarts was such a great game that even mom and dad would play. We kids would play each other for Petoskey stones. Mom and dad would play for shots. Whenever one of them scored a point, the other one would have to drink a jelly shooter as a penalty. These shooters were like Jell-O shooters only we couldn't’t afford Jell-O. However, the relatives gave us lots of homemade jelly at Christmas time.

How do you play lawn jarts? Well, lawn jarts are like short spears with a long point on one end and a weight up near the point. The other end of the jart had a handle on it and just a little ways past the handle were plastic fins like the fins on a regular indoor dart. You would divide into two teams and each team had a plastic yellow ring that would be laid out several yards from each other. Each plastic ring was about two feet across and the way to score points was to stand at one ring and fling the jarts toward the other ring. Each time your jart stuck in the ground within the opposite ring, you would score a point. The first team to score 20 points or, the first team to have a parent fall to the ground and go to sleep, lost.

Because dad started downing penalty jelly shooters long before the game started, everyone wanted mom on their team. His team very seldom got to 20 points. We all piled on top of him to wake him up but, all he did was snore. If the next day were a work day he would always call in sick.

Lawn jarts, like the ones we had as kids are just about impossible to find now. I guess there was some sort of safety recall. It seems some people might have had accidents with the points of the lawn jarts. Instead of throwing the jarts at the yellow rings, people would accidentally toss the rings at the people standing near the yellow rings. We had our share of close calls, accidents, trips to the emergency room and near death experiences but, no one ever had an eye put out. I did get stabbed in the kidney and my brother Mike was stabbed in the foot. My brother Ted had one stuck in his head for a week before he finally had the gumption to pull it out. These were just minor injuries that bandages and duct tape took care of. Overall, lawn jarts was great summer fun. If I ever have kids, lawn jarts will be the first toy I find them at the land fill.