Tough to make a buck..

There were no such things as allowances, well at least not where I grew up. You wanted money, you go out and work for it. My six brothers and I would do all the jobs our dad had us to do around our house, and we got clothes, food and a roof over our head as my dad put it. If we wanted spending money we had to go out and work elsewhere, (mowing yards, painting, trimming trees, picking up soda pop bottles people threw from their cars to get the deposits for them at the store, three cents a piece if I remember correctly.) You could mow two acres of grass for six to ten dollar, depending on how many shrubs there were to mow around and trim. And the ones I hated the most would let the grass get six inches tall or more before they would have you cut it and THEN not want to pay you extra because it was twice as long as it should have been before you mowed. Once while negotiating how much extra it would be with one older neighbor ladies who was a real tightwad. And to make it worse, she had horses and in the summer the horse shit smell around her place was something awful. Anyway without realizing it a snake had wound around my right leg and when I felt something on my leg I reached down to scratch it or shoo it a way is when I realized it was a snake I would guess about three feet long, looking right at me. Well, needless to say I did a one legged dance that has never been duplicated since to shaking that thing off my leg. She walked out calmly and picked it up by the tail and threw it about 15 feet. She said " it's only a garden snake". I didn't care what kind of snake it was, I then priced the lawn mowing job so high, she turned me down. Needless to say snakes are not one of my favorite reptiles. It was tough to make a buck back then.