My grandson and I have been working to repair a fence at their farm. The fence is around the orchard and is not part of the system of fences that keep livestock in their pastures. This fence is primarily ornamental. It shows off the farm to those driving by on the road. It also marks the boundary of the yard for the youngest child in their family. The fence is now nearly complete. We are at the stage of painting. Although the old fence was white, we are painting our repaired fence red.

When it comes to painting fences, things have changed quite a bit since I was the age of our grandson. And they have changed even more since my father was his age. Other things, however, haven’t changed. I work with our grandson primarily because it is a fun thing to do. Working side by side gives me an opportunity to tell him some of our family stories and maybe even to teach him a thing or two about life.

Yesterday’s chore was pretty simple. We have designed the fence so that the picketed portions are in sections that can be lifted from brackets on the fence posts. We remove the sections and lay them on a tarp on the ground to paint them. This allows us to return them to places next to plants without getting paint on the plants. The section where we are currently working has a lot of lilacs on one side of the fence. On Friday, I had painted two sections of the fence on the ground and our job yesterday was to lift those sections back into place. The job took less than five minutes.

I had carefully warned our grandson that there might be some places on the panels where the paint might not be fully dried and suggested that he might want to wear gloves. What I didn’t count on was that he might maneuver the panel into place by pushing against it with his body. The result was red paint on his orange shirt. Fortunately for us, the paint is latex and I was able to clean the paint out of the shirt. He also had to wash some paint off of his hands.

The lesson I learned is that we really can’t do any projects involving paint with him unless he is wearing his painting clothes.

We are fortunate, however, one of the changes from my youth is that fences and barns are now painted with latex paint. Cleanup is with soap and water. When I was his age most exterior paints were oil based and required paint thinner for clean up. Clothing that came into contact with paint usually was permanently stained.

The experience prompted me to tell a story about my father, his grandfather, when he was a teen. My dad grew up in a family with five boys. There were a lot of stories about all of the boys, many of which involved some kind of adventures with the youngest, whose name was George. My grandmother often called him Georgie, but I don’t think he favored that appellation.

The boys were charged with the job of painting the windmill. As was common on farms and ranches of the day, the exterior of all of the farm buildings were either red or white. Barn paint was less expensive than other colors. The windmill was to be painted red. Painting it involved climbing it. There was a ladder built into the tower, but getting the entire tower painted meant climbing on the structure away from the ladder. Rather than try to lift the entire five gallon paint pail, the boys were dipping about a half gallon of paint into another bucket and painting from that bucket. Carrying the paint up the tower was time consuming so they came up with the plan of rigging a rope so that a person on the ground could pull the rope and the bucket would rise to the one on the tower with the paintbrush. Georgie was elected to be the one on the ground pulling the rope.

The rope was rigged and the bucket was tied to the end. George pulled and it rose toward his older brothers. He looked up at it as it rose. When the bucket was just a bit too low for my father to reach it, the lip of the bucket struck a cross bar on the tower, tipping the bucket. The result was that Georgie’s face and shoulders were painted red. Although they scrubbed Georgie, there was still paint visible in his hair for at least a week.

I suspect that the story became exaggerated in the years of telling. I heard both my father’s and my grandmother’s versions of the story. My grandmother’s version had Georgie as an innocent victim who was simply following orders from older brothers. My father reported that Georgie was careless and didn’t listen to advice from his older brothers.

I think the story came out when I was about the age that my grandson is now after I had ruined a nearly new pair of jeans by choosing the wrong clothing to wear when painting an out building at our place. I had been sure that there was no way I would get paint on my pants, but I had been wrong. I didn’t get into much trouble for my mistake, but I did have to listen to the story about Georgie a few times. I guess it was a cautionary tale not to mess with paint.

My grandson got the same treatment yesterday. He wasn’t scolded for his carelessness, but he did have to endure listening to me tell a story that I think he had previously been told.

In the end the windmill tower got painted. The boys grew up. Life went on. The prognosis is good for similar results at our son’s place. The fence will get painted. The boy will grow up. Life will go on.

I won’t be there to hear it, but one day our grandson will tell the story of painting the windmill to someone, perhaps to his children. The concept of paint that won’t scrub off might be foreign to them. Maybe painting with a brush and a pail will be obsolete. I’m sure I can’t imagine all of the details of the lives they will live. The story, however, will likely continue to be told for generations to come.